Microsoft Taking Steps to Comply With the Right to be Forgotten (original) (raw)

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Microsoft Taking Steps to Comply With the Right to be Forgotten

By Mark Scott

July 9, 2014 11:06 am July 9, 2014 11:06 am

LONDON — Microsoft has kept its head down since a European court in May ruled that people could ask Internet search services to delink personal information.

But the company is about to invite a lot more attention.

Microsoft plans to follow the lead of Google, which responded to the court ruling by creating an online form that lets individuals request removal of links to material they say violates their online privacy.

Microsoft, which operates the Bing search service, is expected to introduce its own request form.

“Developing an appropriate system is taking us some time,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “We expect to launch a form through which users can make requests soon.”

The release date of the online form is not yet certain, because Microsoft must coordinate with Yahoo, which also relies on the Bing search engine to power its search services.

Even though Bing has a tiny fraction of Google’s European search traffic, Microsoft may soon be processing a rising number of requests from people demanding the so-called right to be forgotten.

Until now, the focus since the May 13 ruling by the European Court of Justice has been squarely on Google.

The company, which dominates Europe’s search engine market – even more so than in the United States – so far has received more than 70,000 requests to delink material. Microsoft has received a small fraction of that number.

But Bing and the other less-traveled search engines in Europe, like Ask.com, are also obliged to comply with the court decision. The ruling requires that people have a right to seek delinking of personal information they can demonstrate to be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”

The court, Europe’s highest, did not specify what method companies must use to comply with its order. Microsoft therefore chose voluntarily to adopt online forms, more than a month after Google pioneered the approach.

Microsoft’s form is expected to be similar to Google’s. The Google form requires individuals to include the links, the reasons they want them removed, and to provide photo identification.

Although Microsoft declined on Wednesday to discuss its strategy and approach, the company will at least have the benefit of having watched Google’s steps and – some might say – missteps.

The May court decision involved a man in Spain who had tried and failed to persuade Google to remove links to newspaper articles about his debt problems. After the court ruled in favor of a right to be forgotten, Google’s legal and engineering teams had to scramble to build the necessary systems to handle the requests.

The technical hurdles included removing links related to specific individuals’ names from certain search results, and limiting the link removals to only the company’s search domains in Europe.

But removing European web links is not the same as erasing the online material. The links themselves still show up on Google’s non-European search websites, including in the United States. And they also can be found when searching for the same information based on other keywords, instead of someone’s name.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has less than a 3 percent market share in Europe, compared to roughly 11 percent share in North America, according to the Internet traffic analysis company StatCounter.

And yet Microsoft might still experience a significant increase in requests to remove links, once its web form makes the process more automated. Currently, individuals must submit a separate form to the company to make those requests.

When Google released its web form on May 30, for instance, it received about 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours. Microsoft is thought to have received fewer than 20 requests that day.

Although other search engines in Europe have also received a fraction of the requests compared with Google, some are taking a different approach to handling the complaints.

In the Czech Republic, the tech company Seznam, which has roughly 25 percent of that country’s search engine market, according to StatCounter, asks individuals first to contact the websites that have published the information. If the websites remove the material, Seznam says it alters its search results to reflect the changes.

Seznam has received less than 10 requests since the European court’s ruling in May, according to Irena Zatloukalova, a company spokeswoman. She said the number of requests was similar to the number of complaints the company typically had received before the court’s ruling.

Valerie Combs, a spokeswoman from Ask.com, which has less than a 1 percent share of Europe’s search engine market, said the company had received only a “small number of requests.”

“We are developing policies and procedures to answer these requests,” Ms. Combs said.

While the search-engine companies struggle with the legal complexities of complying with the court’s ruling, European countries’ data regulators are already weighing in on the debate.

The privacy watchdogs from France and Britain — where people have been some of the most active in seeking the removal of links — say they have started to receive complaints from individuals not satisfied with Google’s responses to their requests.

Under the court ruling, search providers like Google and Microsoft must make the first decision about whether a link should be removed. But European countries’ national data protection authorities remain the final arbiters.

“We have received a handful of complaints that we are now considering,” said a spokesman for the Information Commissioner’s Office in Britain.