Mountain View, CA – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) The next big legal battle is probably closer than we thought with this technology giant and the CNIL getting warmed up to collide with each other.
France’s data-protection regulator – also known as the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) – rejected Google’s appeal to expand Europe’s “right to be forgotten” to every one of its websites worldwide, including Google.com. If the request is not applied Google may face sanctions proceedings.
The mentioned “right to be forgotten” was established by the European Union’s Court of Justice roughly a year ago and it provides European residents with the option to force search engines to links that appear in searches for their own name.
Google’s answer was to apply the ruling of the request but only from European domain names such as Google.fr. The company insisted that expanding the right to be forgotten to other domain names would open the door to more authoritarian governments who may wish to apply censorship on the Internet at a global scale.
“As a matter of principle we respectfully disagree with the idea that one national data protection authority can assert global authority to control the content that people can access around the world,” a spokesman said.
Continuing, “We’ve worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten ruling thoughtfully and comprehensively in Europe, and we’ll continue to do so. But as a matter of principle, we respectfully disagree with the idea that a single national data protection authority should determine which webpages people in other countries can access via search engines.”
In addition, Google accidentally released on July 2015 some information in a transparency report, according to which less than 5% of the nearly 220,000 requests concerning the right to be forgotten came from criminals corrupted politicians and public figures who wanted to scrub clean their pasts.
In response to the above statements, the CNIL and some European regulators have stated that Google’s policy allows individuals to access information on other people who want their info removed, by simply searching on non-European sites, thus undermining the ruling’s effectiveness in Europe.
Things could escalate quickly and pretty soon we might witness the case being brought to a European level which could create strong conflicts as well as a lot of inconvenience issues for both parties.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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