Google Sued in Europe-Privacy Test Case
PARIS—A sadomasochistic sex party is the latest battlefield in the Web's privacy war. — Google Inc. was hauled into a French court Wednesday by former Formula One racing head Max Mosley, who wants the Internet giant to scrub its search results of grainy images of a sexual escapade.
Context & Ripple Effects
This suit is not Google's first trip to a French courtroom: in September 2010 a French court convicted the company and one of its executives of defamation, a verdict contemporaneous coverage flagged as signaling a larger threat than the fine itself. What has changed by September 2013 is the theory of harm — from what Google published about someone to what its search index surfaces about them.
First-order effects
- Max Mosley is asking a Paris court to compel Google to scrub grainy images of a sexual escapade from its results, putting the company in the position of defending its index of third-party content rather than its own speech.
- Google's immediate exposure is remedial, not just reputational: an adverse ruling would create a court-ordered deletion duty against specific URLs in a major European market.
Second-order effects
- Other Europeans with embarrassing search results gain a tested template — a named plaintiff, a national court, and a removal demand aimed at the engine rather than the original publisher.
- The case forces Google to argue jurisdictional limits (a French court dictating global search results) at the same moment regulators are scrutinizing its conduct in Europe on multiple fronts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — national courts treating search engines as accountable for what they index rather than neutral conduits — Europe moves toward a regime where the right to control search visibility is litigated claim by claim, with engines building takedown operations as a core compliance function.
The trend: European courts and plaintiffs are converging on search engines themselves as legally responsible for the private information their results expose.