French Regulator Orders Google to Apply the “Right to be Forgotten” to all domains

Currently, people who file successful requests over the “right to be forgotten” rule have the link leading to their social media profiles or information removed from results effectuated with searches using the French and other EU Google domains, but still appear when searched on other domains, including the company’s most popular google.com. Requests for the rule are accepted if the user can prove that the redirected links are either irrelevant or invalid.

“In accordance with the CJEU judgement, the CNIL considers that in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing” is said in a statement on the CNIL site.

The “right to be forgotten” rule was passed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in May 2014, but has been disputed by the search engine giant ever since. In the first five months since its enactment, Google has apparently received over 140.000 takedown requests that needed reviewing, with over 40 percent of them being approved – resulted in the search engine blacklisting over 170.000 links on respective domains.

However, Google argues that this process is way too time consuming for its actual benefits. The Silicon Valley giant claims that blacklisting links on their search engine does not have the intended effect as the pages themselves still remain online, and are accessible either by direct link or by using other search engines which didn’t receive a blacklisting request. But while this might be true, the fact that Google controls 90 percent of the search engine market in Europa does certainly make information about a blacklisted person less likely to be found.

A spokesperson for Google provided an unclear reply regarding the whole situation stating that the company has been working in cooperation with the EU data protection regulators to implement the “right to be forgotten” and that the approach they have taken towards solving the problem fully complies with the ruling.

Image Source: Huffington Post