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from
NPR Website the right to get search results about himself removed.
Now
people and governments the world over are seeking him out.
He's not a young math geek who builds driverless cars, nor does he promise to make a tech product for the masses. His crusade is different.
The 63-year-old year old
Shefet has staged an astonishingly effective campaign in Europe to
thwart the torrent of fake news and damaging personal attacks that
course through the Internet by taking on the tech giants.
He is on a mission to kill free speech - at least the way the United States understands it.
He has one aim, and it is directed squarely at a select few in Silicon Valley.
These might sound like
the perishable musings of an armchair critic or an op-ed columnist.
But Shefet has legal street creed.
The growing backlash against tech giants globally and in this country - where fake news, election interference by Russia and recent revelations of the Cambridge Analytica breach - have led to demands for greater scrutiny of, All this has made the Danish-born Shefet a free-speech-slaying jet-setter.
He is the man to know if
a country - whether a democracy, a dictatorship or a tribal kingdom
- wants some control over what can live online within its borders.
Almost everything he says is punctuated by self-deprecating jokes and an easy laugh, his blue eyes crinkling with mirth.
But his playful demeanor doesn't conceal the gravity with which he describes the immense power of the Internet giants.
For Shefet, there was a moment when it did go too far.
And the fight was
personal...
pushing back against the power of the tech titans
under
the banner of the "right to be forgotten."
He wrote employment contracts and analyzed intellectual property claims.
That all changed, he
says, when a client's vengeful enemy took to the Internet and
created websites that attacked Shefet - claiming he was a member of
the Serbian mafia.
But the
pages quickly rose to the top of his Google search results. Some
colleagues began to question Shefet openly, and he realized he
couldn't ignore it anymore. He felt his reputation and his career
might unravel.
Google's lawyers ignored it...
That would have been the end of the story if not for a dusty law, nearly two decades old, revived by the European Court of Justice soon after.
Its directive asserts that people have a right to privacy, even on the Internet, and that search engines like Google must determine whether an individual's privacy right outweighs the public's right to know even correct information.
And so, the "right to be forgotten" law for the Internet was born.
Buried near the midpoint of the 100-paragraph opinion was the legal ammunition that Shefet needed. The judges suggested there is an "inextricable link" between Google's Mountain View headquarters and any of its subsidiaries around the world.
So Shefet made a novel legal argument:
Meaning Google's Paris office, responsible for selling ads to French buyers, would have to pay for every day the California headquarters ignored Shefet's takedown request.
He sprinted to a French court and won. Google would face a fine of $1,200 a day, or obey. The company obeyed.
Shefet's victory signaled just how easy it might be to make the tech titan bend to one's will. And so the floodgates opened with private citizens, companies and governments around the world all seeking his counsel.
He became an improbable hero.
The globe-trotting speech slayer
Shefet's penthouse office on Paris' Right Bank has bookshelves, lined with black leather-bound copies of French civil code.
But they're obscured by trinkets from his new life that has taken him around the world.
Shefet points to a wooden sculpture from Cuba - a hand clenched in a fist, but for a very large middle finger sticking up in the air.
A bronze bust of Alexander the Great is set beside another gift, a statue of the Indian god Krishna, which he received when he traveled to Delhi - back when he was just beginning his global anti-Google crusade.
These days, Shefet is also reading a lot of paperbacks that lie strewn about his office.
His current obsession is pre-World War II information warfare - reminiscent of the kind that is fought on the Internet these days.
Shefet's office is a quick walk from the Élysée Palace, France's White House.
He fields calls from far-flung governments,
...seeking his counsel on how to censor extremism and hate speech online.
In Germany, he has advised Angela Merkel's administration on a hate speech law that she pushed through, which makes tech companies subject to fines of about $60 million if they break it.
He is advising senators in France on a similar law being drafted there.
Shefet has clearly made his mark in Europe, where suspicion of Silicon Valley already runs deep and the idea of an absolute right to free expression is widely seen as damaging and absurd.
Since his victory against Google, Shefet is also hearing more from Americans.
A state assemblyman wants advice on a bill that gives New Yorkers a right to privacy similar to what Europeans have. Consumer groups want expert testimony. And individuals reach out, too.
Not every case is as clear-cut as the false claims Shefet says were leveled against him. Some people end up in the news and want their Google searches changed so a single event doesn't dominate their digital life.
Several years ago, a man who was getting his Ph.D. was the victim of a brutal police assault. In 2017, he was on the job market and wanted Google to stop highlighting the news reports that included pictures of his bloodied face.
He enlisted victims advocate groups to help, but Google declined.
Caroline Memnon sued her Manhattan law firm for discrimination, and the parties entered a confidential settlement.
But when news of her case leaked to The New York Sun and law blogs, the Columbia Law grad feared her reputation was forever damaged.
Both she and the assault victim reached out to Shefet, who brainstormed arguments each could make to claim standing in Europe to sue Google.
While it's far-flung, Shefet argues, they don't have a chance in the U.S.
It's different in the United States
Shefet is part of a much larger movement in Europe pushing back against the power of the tech titans under the banner of the,
The movement has achieved tangible results.
Source: Google Credit: Hilary Fung/NPR
Source: Google Credit: Hilary Fung/NPR
Since the 2014 landmark court ruling, Google says in a recent report, it has received requests to hide or delist about 2.4 million Web addresses in Europe.
Some were fake news. Some were factually true.
However, people cited in those pages made the case to Google that the stories harmed their privacy interests without serving the public interest. The search giant agreed to delist about 43 percent of those pages.
In the U.S., Google consents to such requests only in the rarest circumstances, typically requiring a court order.
Google's top privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, is based in Paris. The company sent him there to counter the movement Shefet helped build.
When NPR asked Fleischer if Americans should have the same right to Internet privacy that Europeans have, he says,
What's more, he says, it's the wrong question.
The right one is:
Fleischer doesn't want Americans to be seduced by the European option.
He offers two arguments to make his point. First, the U.S. - more so than any other country on earth - values free speech. So much so that it's a First Amendment right.
What Europe is doing, he says,
And second, Europe's new laws are creating an Internet that people can exploit to hide the truth, Fleischer says.
As examples, he cites people with criminal records who want to bury accurate news reports; lawyers and dentists who want to hide the complaints of unhappy customers; business owners obsessed with projecting a certain image.
He downplays Shefet and says he is familiar with his work, from reading about him in the press.
Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Charles Tobin, a prominent media lawyer, says he is very familiar with Shefet and fears his message cuts against a transparency society.
However, he has invited Shefet to speak at an American Bar Association session in Paris about speech and privacy.
Google declined to say how many requests the company receives or honors from Americans seeking to remove a search result.
One New York man tried. But to no avail.
He asked not to be named for fear of further damaging his reputation, having lost his career after his name was cited in a news story about a Wall Street investment firm that was misleading investors.
He has since asked for and received letters from both the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming his innocence and he has shared them with Google.
But despite these affirmations, which he showed NPR, Google would not remove the article from search results. It has been eight years and he still can't get a job. He and his wife want children, but his entire life is on hold.
He mailed a letter to the home of Google CEO Sundar Pichai pleading his case:
Pichai did not respond.
One of the Google chief's lawyers, Lee-Anne Mulholland, did write to the New York man in an email:
Google declined to comment further on the case.
The aspiring peacemaker
But Shefet does not want the tech titans to see him as the enemy.
Though he has made his mark in the opposition, he says he wouldn't mind being a peacemaker, a broker between Silicon Valley and people who feel they've been harmed by the sludge on the Internet.
In fact, he was a very serious child, perhaps because he came from a broken home, Tom Hoyem posits:
Dining at a small Paris pub, Shefet talks about how his family shapes his worldview.
When Shefet was a young boy, his parents split up. It was at a time when almost no one divorced.
For many years they had no contact, which made Shefet sad because, he says, his father was a vast ocean of knowledge, a repository of obscure facts and insightful answers.
Fast-forward 15 years and not only did the animosity fade but, in a surprise twist, Shefet's parents remarried.
The lesson is not simply that there's a thin line between love and hate; but, as Shefet puts it,
He hopes it takes the titans and their disaffected users less time than it took his mom and dad.
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