James Delahunty
10 Jan 2019 19:00
Google has been backed by an adviser to the European Union's top court on where the Search provider would have to remove search results under the 'right to be forgotten.'
The 'right to be forgotten' is the right of Europeans to petition Search engines to remove search results under certain circumstances. For example, if inaccurate information was published about a citizen that was damaging, then that citizen can petition search providers to remove it from its results.
Google has been skeptical of the entire concept from the start and ended up in a dispute with French regulators in 2016. The data regulator CNIL fined Google €100,000 because it did not remove information across national boundaries. Google appealed the fine, initiating an examination.
The Search giant warned that if it were forced to remove results globally, it could help less democratic regimes to enforce censorship.
Advocate General Maciej Szpunar, acting as an adviser to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) backed Google and advised that Google should not have to remove information from search results globally because of the right to be forgotten. Szpunar finds that the right to be forgotten should not affect search results outside of the European Union.
The ECJ is still to make a decision but it tends to side with the analysis for advisers in these cases.