Google will inform publishers quietly that it has removed websites from search results under Europe’s “right to be forgotten” rules, following a Swedish court ruling that the search engine applies globally. Stopped.

Previously, when an individual requested that records about them be deleted under EU data protection law, Google would notify the publisher of the original article.

Media companies, including the Guardian, are largely exempt from regulation, but links to journalistic content can be removed from databases such as search engines.

Currently, Google only notifies publishers that a URL has been removed, without providing details about what or why.

As a result, journalists are unable to identify situations in which the right to be forgotten is being misused to obscure legitimate reporting about serial offenders, hampering their ability to challenge the most serious rights violations.

A Google spokesperson said: “We have introduced a new approach to notifications following a decision by the Swedish Data Protection Authority. It came into force.”

“Although we did not agree with this decision at the time, it is binding and supports EU-wide regulatory guidance. We have therefore made strong efforts to comply with it. Ta.”

One of the changes introduced by the GDPR in 2016 was to ensure that EU national court decisions on data protection set precedent across the bloc.

A Swedish court ruled in December that notifying webmasters that search engines have removed links to their content is itself a violation of the privacy of people who have requested the right to be forgotten.

“Thus, the Administrative Court found that once Google granted the deletion of search results, the interests of individuals in privacy and effective protection of personal data generally outweighed Google’s interests. [sic] Send a message to the webmaster, concludes. according to International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Upheld a 50 million Swedish kronor (£3.8 million) fine against search engines for failing to remove URLs they were asked to remove from their lists.

Within weeks of the first judgment in May 2014, which ruled that the right to be forgotten applied to Google, six Guardian articles were removed from the European version of the search engine.

Three of the charges related to now-retired Scottish Premier League referee Dougie McDonald, who was found to have lied about his reasons for awarding penalties in a football match in 2010. . Others included his 2002 article about a lawyer facing a fraud trial and his 2011 article about a French office worker who makes his art Post-It Notes.

Over the next five years, the search engine received about 1 million unique forgotten requests, and even though more than half were rejected, it still removed about 1.5 million unique URLs.