France Gives Google 15-Days to Apply Right to Be Forgotten Requests
France's data privacy agency has ordered Google to remove search results worldwide upon request, giving it two weeks to apply the "right to be forgotten" globally.
France's data privacy agency has ordered Google to remove search results worldwide upon request, giving it two weeks to apply the "right to be forgotten" globally.
French data protection authority, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), has given Google a 15-day deadline to apply the so-called right to be forgotten ruling to its entire search database, not just listings for specific geographies, or face the risks of “sanctions”.
The rollout of the link removal service outside Europe was first put forward last year by the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) after the European Court of Justice ruled people have the right to have searches specific to themselves removed from the firm’s search index.
“Limiting delisting to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the ruling,” the WP29 said at the time.
“In practice, this means that in any case, delisting should also be effective on all relevant .com domains.”
Now the CNIL is taking action against Google in response to complaints from “hundreds” of citizens that Google has failed to apply the ruling in this way.
“Although the company has granted some of the requests, delisting was only carried out on European extensions of the search engine and not when searches are made from google.com or other non-European extensions,” CNIL said.
“In accordance with the Court of Justice of the European Union judgement, the CNIL considers that in order to be effective, delisting must be carried out on all extensions of the search engine and that the service provided by Google search constitutes a single processing.”
The CNIL has given Google 15 days to make the required changes, or else it has threatened that it will face sanctions. If it does comply, the matter will be considered closed.
“No further action will be taken if the company complies in all aspects and in the given period of time with the formal notice.,” it added.
SEW’s sister publication V3 has asked Google to respond but had received no reply at the time of publication.
This article was originally published on V3.