Data Protection

France fines Google over "right to be forgotten"- Case Study
BRUSSELS | BY JULIA FIORETTI March 24th, 2016

The "right to be forgotten" is a name given to the May 2014 European Court of Justice ruling that "people could ask search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for people's names."

The French data protection authority fined Google 100,000 euros ($111,720) because they did not remove requested search results more widely throughout Europe. Google did comply, but only removed the data from local engines like Google.de (Germany) and Google.fr (France). Soon after they were asked to expand to include Google.com because of how easy it is to switch to different extensions.

Google disagreed with the reasoning that they believe the CNIL "doesn't have the right to control the content that people can access outside France". They did try and address the concerns by removing results across all domains including Google.com— but only when it is accessed from the requesting country. So, "if a German resident asks Google to de-list 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." Google expressed that removing all results from all possible extensions would be detrimental to the "free flow of information".

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