Compliance Management, Privacy

Google’s ‘right to be forgotten’ appeal dismissed by France

Google's appeal on the 'right to be forgotten' for all of their websites has been rejected by France. The decision to reject the claim requires Google to close a loophole that allowed searchers to defeat a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) last year. THE CJEU recognised the right to be forgotten in May 2014, which allowed people to ask search engines not to display specific links that may appear from a search on their name.

The right to be forgotten will not erase traces completely, but make them more difficult to find. Google obeyed the CJEU ruling and removed certain results that were requested from searches conducted on google.fr, google.co.uk and its other European sites. Google also provided an online tool making it easier for people to request removal of links to information about them.

A continued display of the disputed links in response to searches on google.com that gave anyone who wanted uncensored search results an easy way around the court ruling aggravated the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL). The CNIL ordered Google to hide disputed search results across all of its sites in May of this year. The CNIL said Google in turn received thousands of requests from French citizens requesting them to forget search results about them.

Google filed an informal appeal against that order in July with the argument that the order amounted to censorship and restriction of the public's right to information. Google sought to extend French law outside French borders. CNIL turned down Google's request on Monday saying they considered Google's assorted domain names as different paths to the same operation, which would limit the right to be forgotten only to some domains. 

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