Google Bends to European Pressure on Right to be Forgotten Rule

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 [e-mail] and Sam Schechner at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 11, 2016 18:21 ET (23:21 GMT)

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