Brussels, 31/07/2015 (Agence Europe) - US company Google published a statement on its European website on Thursday 30 July explaining that it will not be implementing the request by the French civil liberties commission (CNIL) to apply the 'right to be forgotten' globally, but would simply be applying it in Europe.
Following a European Court of Justice ruling of May 2014 on the right to be forgotten (see EUROPE 11078), CNIL, which pilots the 'Article 29' group of data protection authorities in the EU member states asked Google to de-list links not only to European websites ending in dot.eu but also to the American sites ending dot.com.
The Court of Justice says people can ask Google to stop showing in its search results information about them that “can be deemed inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” (such as out-of-date information, insulting web pages and the like). Google has put a form online and set up a system for processing such requests.
On Thursday, the US giant said it would not follow up on the CNIL request to de-list links to sites outside the EU as “This is a troubling development that risks serious chilling effects on the web. While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally.”
Google says “We believe that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. We also believe this order is disproportionate and unnecessary, given that the overwhelming majority of French internet users - currently around 97% - access a European version of Google's search engine like google.fr, rather than Google.com or any other version of Google.”
CNIL instructed Google to comply with its request or reject it by 30 July. CNIL says it will examine the arguments put forward by the American company and reserves the right to take further action, explains French newspaper Le Monde. (Solenn Paulic)