The European Union’s Top Court has issued a ruling that relieves Google from applying the right to be forgotten beyond the EU’s borders. In other words, Google does not have the obligation to remove links from its search results, unless the request was made within Europe.
The right to be forgotten grants Europeans the right to request the removal of links to pages that contain personal information about themselves. Since the right’s establishment in 2014, Google has received over 845,000 requests to remove a total of 3.3 million web addresses, with approximately 45% of the links being delisted. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) added further obligations to this, giving an organization just one month to respond to individual requests made either verbally or in writing.
Google stated that they’ve worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten in Europe with the hopes of establishing a balance between an individual’s rights of access to information and privacy. However, if there is a detection of a search being carried out within Europe’s borders, Google must remove the results from its European sites and restrict results from other sites, including Google.com. If an individual masked their location by using a Virtual Private Network, they could still get around this action.
In 2015, Google received an order from the CNIL to globally remove search result listings to pages containing false or damaging information about an individual. Google then introduced a geoblocking feature that prevented European users from being able to view delisted links, but the feature resisted censoring search results for people living beyond Europe’s borders. Following this geoblocking feature, the CNIL tried imposing a $109,901 fine on Google that the firm successfully avoided because, under EU law, Google has no obligation to carry out de-referencing requests made by a data subject on all versions of its search engine.
A second ruling issued by the court stated that a link does not qualify for automatic removal just because it contains information regarding an individual’s sex life or criminal record. Such listings involving sensitive information should be kept where people’s freedom of information rights are to be preserved. The purpose of this ruling is to hide sensitive information that is “inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive.”
