Your trusted source

Google does not have to apply Europe’s landmark “right to be forgotten” law globally, the continent’s highest court has ruled, The Guardian reports. 

The right to be forgotten was enshrined by the European court of justice in 2014, when it said Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.

On Tuesday, the ECJ ruled that there was no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator to extend the 2014 ruling beyond the EU member states. However, it added that a search engine operator must put measures in place to discourage internet users from going outside the EU to find that information.

“The balance between right to privacy and protection of personal data, on the one hand, and the freedom of information of internet users, on the other, is likely to vary significantly around the world,” the court said in its decision. The court said the right to be forgotten was not an absolute right.

The case touched on the thorny issues of balancing data privacy and protection concerns against the public’s right to know, posing questions about how to enforce the law when it comes to the borderless internet. Tuesday’s ruling stems from a dispute between Google and the French privacy regulator CNIL, which in 2015 called for the firm to globally remove links to pages containing damaging or false information about a person.

Google introduced a geo-blocking feature in 2016 following year, which stopped European users from being able to see delisted links. However, it resisted censoring search results for people in other parts of the world, challenging a €100,000 (£88,376) fine CNIL tried to impose.

The technology firm argued that, if this rule were applied outside Europe, the obligation could be abused by authoritarian governments trying to cover up human rights abuses.

Google says it has received 845,501 “right to be forgotten” requests in the past five years, leading to the removal of 45% of the 3.3m links referred to in the requests. Although the content itself remains online, it cannot be found through online searches of the individual’s name.