Oliver Süme, eco Director of Policy and Law, is ambivalent about yesterday’s ECJ ruling:
“We welcome the fact that here, for the first time, we have a clarification of the location of accountability, which contributes to legal certainty. At the same time, this means that we now need a European basic regulation on data protection, which will lead to a harmonization of the regulations here at the European level.
However, we hold as fundamentally wrong the inappropriate role that the judgment ascribes to search machines in the future, in the ensuring of personal rights. It can not be in the public interest that in the future every private person can have simply any information deleted from search results. Here, there must be some kind of examination process. This function should not, however, be in the hands of the services. These are being given the obligation for something which they should absolutely not be responsible for. We reject search machine operators being made to assume the future role of a kind of censorship authority, and in this role to assess and decide which personal information will be found or forgotten, and which not. That is, and should remain in the future, the function of courts.”