Eric Schmidt: EU Struck Wrong Balance on 'Right to Be Forgotten'

Eric Schmidt: EU Struck Wrong Balance on 'Right to Be Forgotten'

Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman and former CEO, has weighed in on a top European Union court's "right to be forgotten" ruling, which lets consumers ask Google to remove damaging links. And as you might expect, he's not a fan of it.

“A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google’s perspective, that’s a balance,” Schmidt said during Google's annual shareholders meeting in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday. “Google believes, having looked at the decision which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong.”

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, also told investors that he found the decision “disappointing” and that it “went too far."

The European Court of Justice ruled on Tuesday that consumers have a "right to be forgotten" and can ask Google to remove links that are damaging to their reputation. The case revolved around a complaint from a Spanish man that an auction note on his repossessed home damaged his reputation. The newspaper La Vanguardia published that information in 1998.