French data privacy regulator rejects Google appeal

Google appealed, and has waged a public campaign, arguing that no one country or region has the right to demand its laws be enforced in other territories.

The right to be forgotten is a feature which allows people to request the search engine to hide , from the search results, links to pages from a distant past, which might hurt their image, future employment possibilities, etc. But the company told The New York Times that it disagreed with the CNIL’s effort to expand the right-to-be-forgotten requests beyond Europe.

Secondly, Google retains the right to challenge certain requests if the information is held to be in the public interest, CNIL noted.

Google must remove search results from its entire global database under the European Right to be Forgotten ruling, French data protection authorities have ruled.

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 panel opposed applying the ruling beyond European Union domains.

“In order to find the delisted result, it would be sufficient to search on another extension (e.g. searching in France using google.com)”, the president wrote.

Google previously said in a statement that the ruling is “a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web”. It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non-European players offering their services in Europe.

Google has granted about 40 per cent of the almost 320,000 requests it has received since then, but it has refused to de-list the links on its global sites like Google.com, instead only de-listing them on European versions like Google.fr or Google.de.

This only applied in Europe but in June France’s data regulator told Google to remove results seen by everyone.

The agency said that its decision does not mean it’s trying to apply French law outside the nation.

Google refused to comply with that order, though, and so in May this year the French data protection body CNIL issued Google with a 15-day deadline to begin implementing the ruling. Under incoming French regulation the fine could increase to between 2% and 5% of global operating costs.