Google Inc. fell to go with a batch from a position privateness regulator in France and de-list the inquiry end result that is actually disobey the “right to be forgotten” of its internet search engine the world over.
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That stemmed from a ruling in May last year by the European Court of Justice that European residents can ask search engines, such as Google or Microsoft’s Bing, to delete results that turn up under a search for their name when they are out of date, irrelevant or inflammatory, the so-called right to be forgotten.
Under the law, Google has evaluated and processed over a quarter of a million requests to delist links to more than one million individual web pages, the company said. Mr. Fleischer added that such practices could lead to multiple countries’ trying to outdo one another with strict rules, which could eventually reduce all types of material that are available online.
While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally, the company said.
Google has refused to comply with an order by the French privacy watchdog to remove search results on request.
The Article 29 Working Party, the umbrella group for EU data protection regulators, wrote in November that “limiting delisting to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains can not be considered a sufficient mean to satisfactorily guarantee the [privacy] rights of data subjects”.
“If the CNIL’s proposed approach were to be embraced as the standard for internet regulation, we would find ourselves in a race to the bottom”. However, its a price Google may just be willing to pay to preserve what it calls as the freedom of the internet and to prevent a situation where “the Internet would only be as free as the world’s least free place”.
The CNIL said it would examine Google’s appeal and decide whether to accept it in two months.
“We have worked hard to strike the right balance in our implementation of the European Court’s ruling and have maintained a collaborative dialogue with the CNIL and other data protection authorities, who agree with our decisions in the majority of cases referred to them”, Google said.
French regulators last month gave Google 15 days to comply and then vowed to begin drafting sanctions against the company.
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“We have taken note of Google’s arguments which are mostly of a political nature. The CNIL for its part has relied only on legal reasoning”, a CNIL spokeswoman said, according to The Journal. However, the removals have largely been to Google’s European websites.
