Google says it won’t give in to French demands on privacy rights

Google says it won’t give in to French government demands that it remove content from its search engine in “right to be forgotten” cases in countries other than France, the company’s top privacy lawyer has said.

Peter Fleischer, in a blog post on the company’s website Friday, said that the French data protection authority was wrong to ask Google to remove information from search results seen not only by people located in France, but also those initiating searches from other locations as well.

The “right to be forgotten” allows people to ask search engines to remove links to personal information about them on the grounds that it is either outdated or irrelevant. If the search engine refuses, people can appeal to their national data protection authority to compel the search engines to remove the material.

“We are not disputing that Google should comply with the right to be forgotten in Europe,” Fleischer stated in the post. “We have worked diligently to give effect to the rights confirmed by the European Court of Justice. We have delisted approximately 780,000 URLs to date and have granted fast and effective responses to individuals who assert their rights.”

But, Fleischer says, removals from Google in France should not mean removals from Google in other countries.

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Fleischer said France is trying to impose its view on the correct balance between privacy and free speech to every person on the planet. “Any such precedent would open the door to countries around the world, including non-democratic countries, to demand the same global power,” he wrote.

The right was created by a European court ruling in 2014. After this, Google appointed a panel of experts drawn from the media, government, tech sector and academia to advise it on how to comply.

The panel opposed any application of the law beyond the EU, so Google removed items only for a search on its website in the country where the person asking for the removal resided. In March, it expanded its removals to cover anyone searching from within Europe on any of its sites. But users in other, non-European Union countries are still able to find the information, which is what the French data authority has said violates the law.

In May, Google appealed a $105,350 fine that was imposed on the company by the French data authority, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, for failing to remove content it had been asked to delete by French citizens under Europe’s “right to be forgotten” globally. That appeal is still pending.

Jeremy Kahn is a Bloomberg writer. Email: jkahn21@bloomberg.net