Regulator turns down Google’s appeal on global ‘right to be forgotten’

A French regulator on Monday rejected Google’s appeal of a decision that requires it to remove links from its search results — no matter where they show up in the world.

The decision is related to last year’s “right to be forgotten” ruling in which a European court said that citizens could request that links about them be taken down from search results.

{mosads}The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), France’s privacy regulator, has asked Google to apply the decisions related to European users around the world — meaning that a link removed in Europe would also be removed from search results on America’s Google.com.

If the company refuses to comply with the request, CNIL can levy small fines against the company, The Wall Street Journal reported.

In July Google asked the regulator to reconsider its request.

“While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally,” an executive wrote at the time.

A Google spokesperson said that the search engine has “worked hard to implement the Right to be Forgotten ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe, and we’ll continue to do so.” But the spokesperson said that the company still disagreed “as a matter of principle” with the thought of a single country’s data regulator making a decision to restrict the content that people in other countries see in their search result.

Thousands of requests have been made of Google under the “right to be forgotten” ruling since it was handed down last year. The search engine has received 66,707 requests from people with a relationship to France alone. It has received 318,269 in total.

The company has offered examples of requests it has granted, including removing articles about a man whose conviction for a crime was overturned on appeal and stories about an activist’s stabbing.

The battle over the French authorities’ request may set a precedent for how search engines need to apply the ruling around the world. The European Union’s central privacy regulator has called for global implementation of the policy.