Google to expand right-to-be-forgotten search rules in Europe

Reports coming out of Google’s offices are saying that the company will change how it will apply the Right-To-Be-Forgotten Law (RTBFL) inside European countries.

Google’s move, which came to light this week, marks an obvious attempt by the company to compromise with European privacy regulators, who have been pressing the company to broaden the “right to be forgotten” by censoring search results worldwide.

Under the ruling, European Union citizens have the right to ask Google and other search engines to remove content about them as if the data was never there in the first place.

Following a series of pressures by European regulation and privacy authorities, Google will soon start removing unwanted results from all of its domains. And the number of people who pay for a proxy or VPN service is declining after the recent Netflix change that prevents users from accessing Netflix from countries they are not located in.

In November 2014, a French court convicted Google of failing to comply with a right to be forgotten case after it took down links on its French subsidiary but failed to do so globally.

The EU had previously asked for an extension of the rule to include all versions of Google.

The court decided that search engines must assess each individual’s request for removal, and that a search engine can only continue to display certain results where there is a public interest in doing so. Since May 2014, Google has been in disagreement with various authorities in Europe that aim to protect data of its citizens.

Back in July 2015 the French data protection authority, CNIL, had threatened the company with a fine if it did not remove the data from global sites – such as google.com, and Google refused.

Google, however, has stated they will now be filtering the search results based on the user’s IP address.

Google did not comment on the reports, but a source there confirmed them. We do not know what information has been successfully suppressed under this law, and this fundamental paradox – how to provide transparency about information that has been made less accessible on privacy grounds – means it is hard to fully assess the impact of the Costeja ruling. That decision allows anyone in Europe to request search engines like Microsoft’s Bing and Google to remove links to content about themselves, under specific conditions.