Google Changes ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ Results
Google today announced that it is changing the way it delivers ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ search results. The search giant today revealed it will stop displaying information across the world for searches related to European Union residents. Previously, Google scrubbed these results only within the European countries.
Right To Be Hidden Forgotten
According to a 2014 European Union mandate, Google has had to delist results that were deemed to be “inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive and in the public interest”. In accordance with this mandate, Google would have had to delist ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ results that from all of its European domains like like google.de, google.fr, google.co.uk, etc. However, all requested URLs would remain visible from non-European domains, making this right to be forgotten of any use only in Europe.
This changes now, though – according to Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google, the company will delist these “Right To Be Forgotten” URLs/requests all over the world, regardless of where the search has been made from.
Starting next week, in addition to our existing practice, we will also use geolocation signals (like IP addresses) to restrict access to the delisted URL on all Google Search domains, including google.com, when accessed from the country of the person requesting the removal. We’ll apply the change retrospectively, to all delistings that we have already done under the European Court ruling.
Google has given an example too, to explain this further.
Let’s say we delist a URL as a result of a request from John Smith in the United Kingdom. Users in the UK would not see the URL in search results for queries containing [john smith] when searching on any Google Search domain, including google.com. Users outside of the UK could see the URL in search results when they search for [john smith] on any non-European Google Search domain.
