Google wins battle against global ‘right to be forgotten’
LUXEMBOURG: Google won a European Union (EU) court battle against plans to impose a global “right to be forgotten” in the latest landmark ruling over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech.
The EU Court of Justice on Tuesday said search engines should remove results on European versions of its websites and weren’t required to scrub links globally. Five years earlier the same tribunal forced the US tech giant to remove European links to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation. The ruling is binding and can’t be appealed.
The Alphabet Inc. unit chall enged t he French privacy authority’s order to extend the scope t o all of i t s platforms across the world.
In a related ruling on how far Google could cite the public interest to refuse to pull links, judges said the search engine must weigh privacy concerns against users’ right to know in each individual case.
“This ruling is a victory for global freedom of expression,” said Thomas Hughes of Article 19, a human rights campaign group that supported Google in the case.
“Courts or data regulators in the UK, France or Germany should not be able to determine the search results that internet users i n America, I ndia or Argentina get to see.”
French regulator CNIL didn’t i mmediately r e s pond t o a request for comment.
Google had argued that such decisions to make search results disappear pushes the internet into dangerous waters. The 2014 judgment already forces it to offer up different links on European searches than in other regions.
The search-engine giant and its supporters, including press freedom groups, have warned that internet freedom would be brushed aside if less democratic parts of the world embraced the same policy and won the right to remove search results globally.
The court didn’t give Google a blanket right to shrug off European requests for global deletions.