Google To Further Block Some European Search Results
In accordance with the European privacy regulators right-to-be-forgotten rule, Google announced on Thursday that it will be removing search results across all its websites when accessed from a European country.
The Internet search engine has been at loggerheads with several European Union data protection authorities since the European Court of Justice ruled in May 2014, that people could ask search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information that appears under searches for their name, dubbed the “right to be forgotten”.
A source close to Google told Reuters that the search giant will soon make it impossible to use Google.com, for example, to view results that have been delisted when conducting a search from the country where a request was filed.
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According to Reuters, the change will mean that, “If a German resident asks Google to delist a link popping up under searches for his or her name, the link will not be visible on any version of Google’s website, including Google.com, when the search engine is accessed from Germany.”
The move by Google may help soothe objections from EU data-protection authorities over the way it has implemented delistings since the European Court of Justice ruled in May 2014 that Europeans can ask any search engine to remove outdated results returned from a search for the person’s name.
It is understood that Google has informed Europe’s data-protection regulators of the upcoming changes.
The technology giant has been under pressure from the French data protection authority, CNIL, to remove data from its sites globally and threatened to fine the company if it did not do so.
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CNIL said, “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.
“This would equate stripping away the efficiency of this right, and applying variable rights to individuals depending on the internet user who queries the search engine and not on the data subject.”
According to Google’s transparency report, since the law came into effect it has removed 57.5 percent of the 1.36 million URLs it’s evaluated from 385,973 individual requests.
