In May 2014, European lawmakers ruled that Google and other search engines must honor requests from individuals seeking to have their websites removed from search results because they may no longer be relevant or may infringe upon that person’s privacy.
Advertisement
The French now have the “right to be forgotten” worldwide.
On Monday, CNIL turned down Google’s request, saying it considered Google’s various domain names merely as different paths to the same processing operation; limiting the right to be forgotten only to some domains would make it easy to circumvent.
Having lost the appeal, Google must now remove thousands of entries from Google.com as French law does not give the company the right for further appeal.
France’s data protection regulator has rejected Google’s appeal of an order requiring the company to broaden the “right to be forgotten” by censoring search results worldwide.
If the company refuses to comply with the request, CNIL can levy small fines against the company, the Wall Street Journal reported. But with nearly all information searches today beginning with search engines (and it is all search engines that are affected, not just Google), censoring search results effectively amounts to censoring what the world’s population is allowed to know.
France’s data watchdog, the CNIL, disagrees with Google’s opposition and it was happy to serve the final local decision on Google after a period of debate and consideration. The ruling also applies to other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo.
In July, Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, called France’s request to clean up global results “troubling” and said it could risk “serious chilling effects on the web”.
Google has a history of legal woes in Europe where concerns are high over its use of private data.
The agency said that its decision does not mean it’s trying to apply French law outside the nation. Under incoming French regulation the fine could increase to between 2% and 5% of global operating costs.
Advertisement
As a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national Data Protection Authority should determine which webpages people in other countries can access via search engines.
