Google's appeal on cleaning up search results globally rejected

folarin okunola

September 22, 2015 3:07 PM

The European Court of Justice, in a ruling last year, had already granted European residents the right to ask Google to take off information about them from its search result.

Google could face fines in France if it continues to refuse to clean up search results on French citizens globally

French data regulators took a step closer to sanctioning Google by rejecting the tech giant’s request to drop a case against it for refusing to clean up information from its search engine.

The European Court of Justice, in a ruling last year, had already granted European residents the right to ask Google to take off information about them from its search result, if such information was out of date, incorrect, irrelevant, or inflammatory.

Since that ruling, Google has already received nearly 320,000 requests, 40 percent of which it has already attended to. However, the company has only been de-listing the links on the European versions of its sites, such as Google.fr or Google.de, which in turn means that the information is still available, but not on the European versions of Googles’ sites.

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CNIL, the French authority had already ordered Google to de-list all information on request search results appearing under a person’s name from all its websites, including Google.com.

The tech giant refused in July and requested that the CNIL dropped its efforts, which the French authority officially refused to do on Monday.

France is the first country in Europe to officially launch a legal process to punish Google for not applying the right to be forgotten globally.

folarin okunola