UK Gov't Agency Says It Can't Talk About Its Employees' Use Of 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests

Say That Again

from the law-itself-prevents-any-discussion dept

One of the biggest problems (hard to pick just one…) with Europe’s “right to be forgotten” is that it completely fails to consider the fact that those being asked to forget won’t take this sort of government intrusion kindly, especially when requests are more related to burying embarrassments than restoring privacy.

It’s been one backfire after another since the debacle began. Every notable request seems to be accompanied by a story about the removal, resulting in the generation of even more web content to be targeted for selective amnesia.

Everyone wants to know who’s asking to be forgotten and why. A FOI requester in the UK has asked the Dept. of Energy and Climate Change to provide this information on its own employees.

Thank you for your email of 15 August 2014 where you requested the following information:

– “How many times have Ministers in your department, or staff from your department on those Ministers’ behalf, applied to Google or other search engines to have links removed from searches under the ‘right to be forgotten’ following the EU ruling earlier this year?
– Please break this figure down by minister.
– Please detail the web pages run by your department which have been served a notice by Google that they will not be appearing in certain search results as a result of the right to be forgotten.
– How many person-hours have been spent by your staff dealing with the ‘right to be forgotten’ (e.g. writing to or liaising with Google about removal requests)“.

The request pits government transparency against government opacity — although the latter has been generously extended to European citizens with the “right to be forgotten” law. Unsurprisingly, transparency loses, but only inasmuch as the new law ensures transparency will lose.

To the extent that the “Right to be Forgotten” ruling provides that Individuals (in any capacity “official” or otherwise) have the right – under certain conditions – to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them where the information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing, the department holds no “official” information pursuant to your request.

Certainly not the desired response, but the desired response would undermine the law, which the UK government really can’t do. If UK citizens can ask privately to be forgotten, so can public officials. The wording in the response spins the law positively, which is also expected. The only thing the government could have responded to without undermining the law it has to enforce is total up the hours spent dealing with the paperwork.

Presumably, similar requests have been made to other UK government agencies and presumably they will be greeted with similar responses. While this doesn’t shed much light on how many government officials and employees are seeking to cleanse the net of information, we can be assured that any notable request will be duly noted by the entities being asked to forget. The UK government can’t answer these questions without negating this (very questionable) right, but the private sector can still let the world know who wants what gone. One of the best checks against government power is the public itself — even when it’s citizens themselves who are using a bad law to request dubious removals.

Filed Under: right to be forgotten, secrecy, uk, uk government