Google Refuses French Order To Apply 'Right To Be Forgotten' Globally

(RTTNews) - Google Inc. (GOOGL, GOOG) is resisting against France's data protection regulator , after the watchdog ordered the company to extend the so-called "right to be forgotten" to its websites globally.

Earlier this summer, France's data protection regulator, the CNIL, ordered the company to delist links not just from all European versions of Search but also from all versions globally. That means a removal request by an individual in France, if approved, would not only be removed from google.fr and other European versions of Google Search, but from all versions of Google Search around the world.

The company said it respectfully disagrees with the CNIL's assertion of global authority on this issue and it has asked the CNIL to withdraw its Formal Notice.

The company now faces possible fines.

In a ruling in May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) established a "right to be forgotten", allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links from results they show based on searches for that person's name. The company said it moved rapidly to comply with the ruling from the Court. Within weeks it made it possible for people to submit removal requests, and soon after that began delisting search results.

"It's now just over a year later and we've evaluated and processed more than a quarter of a million requests to delist links to more than one million individual web pages," the company said.

While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally, the company said.

Google believes that no one country should have the authority to control what content someone in a second country can access. It also believe this order is disproportionate and unnecessary, given that the overwhelming majority of French internet users—currently around 97%—access a European version of Google's search engine like google.fr, rather than Google.com or any other version of Google.

"As a matter of principle, therefore, we respectfully disagree with the CNIL's assertion of global authority on this issue and we have asked the CNIL to withdraw its Formal Notice," Peter Fleischer, Google's Global Privacy Counsel posted in a blog.