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France Tells Google To Remove "Right To Be Forgotten" Search Results Worldwide
An anonymous reader writes: France's data protection authority rejected Google's appeal to limit how a European privacy ruling may be applied worldwide. Since the European Court ruling last year Google has handled close to 320,000 requests, but only de-lists the links on European versions of its sites. "Contrary to what Google has stated, this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the C.N.I.L. to apply French law extraterritorially," the agency said in a statement.
It's a EU-wide policy that the CNIL is merely spearheading.
There's nothing like $HOME
Because Google has activities and even assets in the EU, and must comply with the EU's data policy.
There's nothing like $HOME
Google just removed the results from some local domains (fr, co.uk etc), but left it working for com domain. Basically it means they failed at delisting since EU citizen can still easily avoid it. Instead they should comply by doing some kind of geoip delisting as then they would be really compliant within EU jurisdiction.
Ridiculous. There is no such law forbidding communication of the race in Sweden. What exist are volontary guidelines in the press to avoid mentioning race, religion, sexual orientation, etc, UNLESS it is relevant.
The French do not try to apply them worldwide.
They want Google to apply them to all searched from France regardless of the domain name. Today you can just type in google.com or any other national domain and bypass the law.
Yes but it appears that only the French are bonkers enough to think to apply the law world wide.
They are actually not trying to apply the law world wide. They are saying that it applies to all the search results Google serve to EU users, regardless of the URL used to access that search result (google.fr, google.com, google.xx). It is perfectly possible for Google to geo-fence this, and many large online services do this on a regular basis.
I cannot believe that there is no discussion about this at higher levels of the EU.
The real problem here is that:
(1) They haven't judicially defined what constitutes public interest -- because they can't because it's subjective, and making such a decision would piss everyone off and demonstrate the absurdity of the law. So there's no legal test for yes/no.
(2) France is still being pissy, and this is retaliation for the whole "media thing" that France had hoped to impose on YouTube and Google Play.
(3) They know that they can't win, so they're dragging their feet. It makes the politicians look like they are doing something, without actually having to really do something.
(4) They are laying the groundwork for a closed-door advisor position, whose job will be to write reports and justify why "it doesn't apply in this case" decisions, and then collect their paycheck.
(5) As soon as the problem is closed door, it effectively goes away, because there's no longer any public leverage.
(6) Then the worst that can happen is "an investigation of the department of investigation", which they can pretend takes as long as they want to/can push off the issue, and then conclude that there was no wrongdoing.
Problem solved. Back to business as usual.
It's insightful because America is notorious for applying its own laws extraterritorially, ie inside other countries. American judges truly believe that what they have to say should apply to all people on earth. The French are merely copying the principle. Expect other countries to follow as well. Turnabout is fair play and all that.