Applying the “right to be forgotten” only to searches on sites aimed at European users should be enough, said Google.
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The California-based company has lodged an appeal with the Conseil D’État over a 2015 ruling from the Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL), France’s data protection regulator, which said that French rulings on the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ should be followed all over the world.
CNIL, the French data protection commission, levied the fine on Alphabet Inc.’s Google in March after a tussle that started with a 15-day ultimatum past year for the Mountain View, California-based company to comply with the order. It would enforce the rule in Europe but retain the content in other markets, including the United States, by creating different privacy standards and rules, SearchEngineLand.com reports.
In France the U.S. giant was fined €150,000 (RM685,080) in 2014 for failing to comply with CNIL privacy guidelines for personal data.
CNIL, though, wants them hidden from all searchers, everywhere, a policy Google’s global general counsel Kent Walker criticized in an opinion column published in the French newspaper Le Monde on Thursday and republished in English on the company’s public policy blog.
The “right to be forgotten” was brought into law by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in 2014, and refers to a person’s right to go about their life without being “stigmatised as a effect of a specific action performed in the past”. “Across Europe we’ve now reviewed almost 1.5 million webpages, delisting around 40 percent”.
In a strongly worded rebuttal that marks its latest clash with European regulators, Google painted the case as a battle for free speech on the web, saying that allowing one country to control how web pages look on the other side of the world would have unwelcome consequences. Initially, Google would de-list challenged results for an individual from the European Union on all searches conducted on its European Union member-state-specific domains, such as google.de or google.fr. “We comply with the laws of the countries in which we operate”, Walker noted. “But if French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries – perhaps less open and democratic – start demanding that their laws regulating information likewise have global reach?” Walker writes: “This order could lead to a global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one’s own country”.
“For hundreds of years, it has been an accepted rule of law that one country should not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of other countries”.
Google said today that it is appealing to France’s Supreme Administrative Court, the Conseil d’Etat.
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CDT raised concerns about even this expansion of the de-listing rule, because of the risk that such policies will legitimize demands from governments across the globe to insist that their censorship laws be applied whenever an online service is accessed from within their country.
