Internet search engines such as Google should not be left in charge of "censoring history", the Wikipedia founder has said, after the US firm revealed it had approved half of more than 90,000 "right to be forgotten" requests.
Jimmy Wales said it was dangerous to have companies decide what should and should not be allowed to appear on the internet. His comments came after the bosses of the leading search engines met the heads of European data watchdogs on Thursday.
Google has been at the centre of a censorship row since the European courts ruled that people should have the right to request that "irrelevant" personal information about them is removed from search results.
Since May, the firm has received 90,000 requests for links to be removed, relating to more than 300,000 pages. More than half of these requests have been approved, it told European data watchdogs.
The authorities have been concerned that the Google has been notifying the owners of pages that are delisted, which led in one case to a person being written about again by the Wall Street Journal.
Google initially made it known that a paedophile, politician and doctor were among the initial removal requests, but has since acknowledged there are some more compelling claims.
Wales's position was backed by Rohan Silva, a tech entrepreneur and former adviser to David Cameron, who tweeted that it was "good to hear (Wales) fighting the good fight against internet censorship".
But the Labour MEP Claude Moraes accused Google of failing to implement the EU ruling properly. He also said the firm was not mentioning the fact that data supervisory authorities were the final arbiters in disputed cases and it was not junior staff making decisions on such issues.
Christopher Graham, the UK information commissioner, said some of Google's concerns were overblown.
"Google is a massive commercial organisation making millions and millions out of processing people's personal information. They're going to have to do some tidying up," he told BBC Radio 5's Wake Up to Money on Thursday.
"All this talk about rewriting history and airbrushing embarrassing bits from your past – this is nonsense, that's not going to happen. There will certainly be occasions when there ought to be less prominence given to things that are done and dusted, over and done with. The law would regard that as a spent conviction, but so far as Google is concerned there's no such thing as a spent conviction."
