Washington: Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond has explained the shortcomings of the ruling handed down by the European Union in May this year, which said that people have the right to be forgotten.
Drummond has said that the verdict given by the European Union Court of Justice contradicts the information on freedom of expression as laid down by the U.N.'s Universal Declaration on Human Rights. He also stated that the language used by the court in its verdict suggests that the removal of results has come after vague tests to ascertain whether the information is of public interest, The Verge reported.
Google's top lawyer conceded that the search engine giant has received about 70,000 takedown requests since May. However, he added that all these requests are evaluated on the basis of a few parameters which include considerations like, whether the information is related to a public figure or not, whether it comes from a trustworthy source or not, when was it published, whether it contains information that is of interest to the consumers or not and whether it mentions criminal convictions that were unspent.
Drummond also said that Google will do its best to comply with the ruling but remarked that such judgements will always be debatable and difficult.
The EU court had earlier held Google responsible for removing outdated or irrelevant search results hosted by third parties.
