Google’s Surprising Role as Privacy Watchdog in Europe

Title, basically: Google is a privacy watchdog in Europe.

Content, basically: Google secretly passes judgement on millions of people's right to be forgotten and does not want to talk about it. Some French organization (which does not seem to be anything government related, but it doesn't say) agrees with Google "most of the time", though, so we've got that going for us.

I fail to see how this is anywhere close to a "privacy watchdog". Speaking as a Dutchman, organizations like Privacy First or Bits of Freedom (both are Dutch) would be privacy watchdogs, not Google who passes judgement on over 500 cases a day just because they're a big player.

> "Other search companies, including Microsoft, have been given the same authority, though their number of judgments pales by comparison."

Yeah, and their market share also pales by comparison. Big surprise.

This article is weird. Google never asked to be regulating this, puts in place a small team to handle the load and then the journalist wonders why they don't want to answer questions about methodology: because it can only backfire. Ideally for Google they wouldn't have to deal with this anymore, that's why they are publishing reports like this the big totals:

https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/europepri...

Share same opinion as @lucb1e, that title is misleading.

Google's role is not surprising nor understood as a privacy watchdog on this context, the company is complying (better or worse) with a right provided to EU citizens.

An example of true privacy watchdog (besides the others already mentioned) would be the FSFE or Julia Reda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Reda

So to have something removed from Google's search engine you ask Google to remove it. How does that make Google a watchdog?

This article makes it appear as if something unusual were happening, but I don't see that at all.

If everyone goes straight to the government or to the courts for every single minor dispute, then I know already who we will all be working for pretty soon.

I'm guessing the intent of the title was to mean "A privacy watchdog should be an independent, possibly public entity, so it's surprising and problematic that a large US corporation has this level of influence over decisions on privacy in Europe".

However, without reading the article content, it very much comes across as "Google is doing such surprisingly benign work that it fills the role of privacy watchdog for Europe".

Recent related regarding Google's relationship to privacy: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-already-mapped-tens-of...

If a public body were to rule on this volume of cases, I assume it would be overwhelmed and expensive.