Google Bends to European Pressure on Right to be Forgotten Rule
February 11 2016 - 6:36PM
Dow Jones News
By Alistair Barr and Sam Schechner
Alphabet Inc.'s Google will expand how it applies Europe's
right-to-be-forgotten rule for search engines, bending to demands
from privacy regulators.
In coming weeks, Google will remove links from all of its global
search sites when a user in a European Union country searches for
information about a person from the same country who has exercised
the right to be forgotten, according to a person familiar with the
situation. For example, links about a German person that Google
agreed should be removed under the right to be forgotten will also
be removed from all Google sites world-wide when the searcher is in
Germany--in addition to being removed from all EU sites regardless
of where the searcher is.
Previously, Google applied the rule only across its EU sites,
including google.fr and google.de. Privacy regulators in Europe
wanted the rule to cover all Google's search sites; otherwise, they
said, users could simply search at google.com.
Google's change is intended as a compromise, but it is unclear
if it will satisfy regulators.
A spokeswoman for the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et
des Libertés, France's data-protection agency, declined to say
whether it would accept Google's proposal, saying that "an inquiry
is currently under way into the new elements Google has provided."
Last year the head of the CNIL told The Wall Street Journal that a
geographically limited implementation wouldn't be sufficient.
The right to be forgotten, established in 2014, lets Europeans
ask search engines to remove links in searches for their own name,
if the information is old, irrelevant or infringes on their
privacy. Google vets takedown requests, weighing privacy rights
against the public interest in the information.
Since May 2014, Google said it had received 385,973 removal
requests, evaluated almost 1.4 million links and removed 42.5% of
them.
Google will try to identify searchers' locations by examining
Internet Protocol addresses and location data of mobile devices,
the person familiar with the situation said.
If a user and the subject are from different countries, even if
both are in Europe, Google said it won't remove links on
non-European sites like google.com. So, a user in Italy could still
use google.com to find information that had been removed in
Germany.
The company plans to make the change after talking with several
data-protection regulators in Europe, the person said. Last year,
CNIL ordered Google to apply the rules world-wide.
Write to Alistair Barr at alistair.barr@wsj.com and Sam
Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 11, 2016 18:21 ET (23:21 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024