Today marked another salvo in the on-going battle over the “right to be forgotten”, with Google filing an appeal to the Conseil d’État of the fine levied by the French data protection authority against the company for failing to modify search results according to French law for searches conducted outside of France. Google’s Global General Counsel, Kent Walker, said that it had always been established that rules can not be imposed on citizens of other countries and that the search engine giant has been working hard to respect these differences across the globe. But if French law applied 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?
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CNIL had asked Google to remove/censor “right to be forgotten” links on a global basis, not just in Europe.
But Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., worked toward a compromise. In other words, if you went to the main US version of Google while in France you will now still only see the France version of Google search results. At Google, a committee of Internet experts arbitrate the requests, deciding whether the public’s right to know a piece of information trumps the requestor’s right to privacy.
Earlier this year, French regulators fined Google $112,000 for failing to censor its site worldwide in response to Europeans’ requests to delete information about themselves.
Google has now appealed to France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’Etat, in an attempt to overturn the decision. Otherwise, you would quickly get down to the lowest common denominator where countries with strict censorship rules would be able to force their standards on more open countries that value free speech, such as the United States.
Although limited to Europe, there have been moves by the European Union to establish the “Right to be Forgotten” globally while Google and experts have called for it to be limited to Europe. That is, removing links to content that may be legal locally from Australia to Zambia, and everywhere in between.
Google’s concern is not just hypothetical; it has resisted similar demands from other countries and has in some cases led to the blocking of its services, Walker noted.
“The experience with the implementation of Google v. Spain is that the vast majority of requests were made by private people concerning private matters”, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of theElectronic Privacy Information Center. A spokeswoman for the CNIL wasn’t immediately available for comment.
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The European Court of Justice has recognised the “right to be forgotten” since 2014, allowing individuals, under certain conditions, to have references to them removed from the internet. The company is already involved in an antitrust investigation on a European level which could also affect the search engine.
