Google asks CNIL to review “right to be forgotten order”
07 Aug 2015
Search engine company Google has called on French data authority CNIL to review its last month's order to remove data from all the local versions of the search engine under right to be forgotten ruling of the European Court.
Following the order as regards ''right to be forgotten'' for removal of records from Google search globally, the search engine had been given 15 days to respond to the French authorities.
Google had already received over 250,000 requests from European citizens for removal of records, following the May 2014 order.
On Google's official blog, Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google said, ''France's data protection regulator, the CNIL, sent us a formal notice ordering us to delist links not just from all European versions of Search but also from all versions globally.
"That means a removal request by an individual in France, if approved, would not only be removed from google.fr and other European versions of Google Search, but from all versions of Google Search around the world.''
According to Google, it had complied with the ''right to be forgotten'' and had allocated adequate resources to help European citizens get their information removed in case it was found outdated, incorrect or violating their rights.
Google removes the data only from the local search engines in Europe while it remained on other country-specific Google search engines.
Meanwhile, according to a blog post by Google, earlier this summer, the company was asked by France's data protection regulator to delist links not just from European versions of search but from all versions, which meant results that no longer show up on google.fr as a result of the right to be forgotten law would need to be removed from google.com.
Google turned down those demands saying ''no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access.''
According to Jonatahn L Zittran, who teaches digital law at Harvard Law School told The New York Times, ''France is asking for Google to do something here in the US that if the US government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment.''
He added, if complied with, the French regulator's order would prevent US citizens from using a US search engine from seeing content that was legal in the US.
