The right to be informed vs. the right to be forgotten. The latest controversial debate is between those who want to see their name deleted from search engines and those who would like to be informed on biographies of known persons or characters which could be found on web sites like Wikipedia.
Lately Wikimedia Foundation reported a certain number of notifications with which Google informed surfers to have deleted some links to Wikipedia following the exercise of the right to be deleted by certain consumers.
Without revealing the name of the applicants, Google explained how to respect the judgment of the European Court of Justice, which guarantees the right to be forgotten (as a result of which Google has received over 90 thousand applications for removal of applicants requesting the right to be forgotten), at least fifty pages of internet encyclopedias have already undergone this procedure. Forty-six pages belong to Wikipedia: among them appears several times the name of the chess player Guido den Broeder and one concerns Gerry Hutch, an Irish imprisoned in the 80s.
One of these requests came from Renato Vallanzasca a notorious Italian mobster who was a powerful figure in the Milanese underworld during the 1970s. Following numerous robberies, kidnappings, murders, and many years as a fugitive, he is currently serving 4 consecutive life sentences with an additional 290 years in prison
Wikimedia Foundation launched an alarm for the defense of freedom of information. " Accurate search results are disappearing from Europe - said Lila Tretikov, executive director of the
Wikimedia Foundation - without any public explanation, no real evidence, no judicial review and no appeal procedure. The result is that unwanted information simply disappears.
Even Google had shown his opposition to the decision of the European Court by the mouth of David Drummond, chief legal officer of the Californian company: "We do not agree with the judgment, it is a bit like saying that a book can be in a library, but can not be included in its catalog. Obviously, however, we respect the authority of the Court and we do our best to adhere to its decisions. "