France’s data protection regulator, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), has ordered Google to remove results from every version of its search engine, not just the European versions.
The call comes a year after the European Court of Justice’s ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling. It gave European residents the ability to request that search engines delete results related to them that they consider out of date, irrelevant or inflammatory.
Google has an online form to allow individuals to request de-listings, but when accepted they only apply to the European search engines, not globally.
The CNIL’s statement says it will move to impose sanctions on the company if it does not begin removing de-listed results from all of its search engines within 15 days.
The authority is not alone in making the demand. Late last year, a group of EU privacy watchdogs made an almost identical statement.
In February, an independent advisory committee, established by Google, rejected the idea of establishing a global ‘right to be forgotten’ rule.
We have contacted Google for comment and will update this post if it offers one.
➤ CNIL orders Google to apply delisting on all domain names of the search engine [CNIL via Reuters]
From the archives: Europe wants Google’s ‘right to be forgotten’ to be applied on global search results
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