France’s data protection agency rejected Google’s appeal of its decision to require the search engine to apply Europe’s Right to Be Forgotten law to all Google domains worldwide.
Google has largely complied with Europe’s Right to be Forgotten laws since it was instituted in 2014, scrubbing its search results of links to Web pages that contain information about individuals, per their requests, that are damaging, irrelevant, or out of date, but only on European domains, such as Google.fr and Google.de, but not from Google.com or Google.co.jp.
In May, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) ordered Google to apply the deletions to all of its domains worldwide, a decision Google appealed, citing principles of free speech. On Monday, CNIL dismissed the appeal, and Google could face a 150,000 euro fine if it refuses to cooperate.
“If this right was limited to some extensions, it could be easily circumvented: in order to find the delisted result, it would be sufficient to search on another extension (for example, searching in France using google.com),” CNIL said in a statement.
From May 2014 to Sept. 21, 2015, Google shows it has received about 318,000 requests for removals of individual search results. In deciding whether or not to fulfill the request, Google considers whether or not there’s a public interest in the information remaining.
Google gives examples of requests it has denied: A prominent businessman in Poland who wanted articles removed about his lawsuit against a newspaper; a media professional in the U.K. who requested the removal of four links to articles about embarrassing content he posted to the Internet.
