Alphabet Inc.’s Google will expand how it applies Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten rule for search engines, bending to demands from privacy regulators.
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Under European privacy law, individuals have the right to ask their country’s Data Protection Agency for removal of search engine results that link to information that is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive.
That means that until now, were a French citizen to ask for a particular result to be removed if found under their name, Google would only scrub it under the local version of the website – google.fr in this case.
Google had previously argued that it was only necessary to remove such links from results provided by the Google site registered under the home country’s top level domain. Searches outside Europe using the USA domain will not be altered.
“To find the delisted result, it would be sufficient to search on another extension (eg searching in France using Google.com), namely to use another form of access to the processing”, CNIL said. The individuals must provide both the links that they would like removed, as well as the search terms linked to that content.
Google has issued notifications to all European Union data protection authorities of the upcoming changes, the report said.
As things stand right now, Google will censor its search results to ensure the details of all those who have agreed to the Right To Be Forgotten program are not accessible to any version of Google’s search site from any location where the program is in force.
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It is also not a particularly good idea to have European Union regulators breathing down their necks at every step they make, which makes this decision wise on the long run. The change came because of ongoing pressure from European courts and policymakers in several E.U countries, the person said. The company has steadfastly refused to remove links to the same results for searches conducted via Google.com and via domains outside Europe. Nevertheless, with the sudden change of heart, it seems as though Google is not very keen on paying huge fines for the right to keep whatever content they want. Expected to be formally adopted sometime early this year and take effect in 2018, the GDPR will “put an end to the patchwork of data protection rules that now exists in the EU”, according to the European Commission. Google still has certain barriers to the “Right to Be Forgotten” rule to be applied, as it requires users to request for the removal based on valid and legal reasons.
