France wants RTBF law to be applied properly

Jun 12, 2015 12:30 GMT  ·  By
France's CNIL wants Google to remove RTBF results from all the search engine's extensions
   France's CNIL wants Google to remove RTBF results from all the search engine's extensions

One year after the European Union's Court of Justice decided that the Right to Be Forgotten law would stand, CNIL, France's user privacy watchdog agency, is now making new formal demands, asking Google to delist approved results from all its domain extensions, not just the French one.

For the past year, Google has been quietly complying with all demands to be forgotten from European citizens. Statistically, the company has removed search results for 40% of all requests.

Users not happy with Google's train of thought and operational procedures always had the possibility to file an appeal with the data protection authority competent in each EU member state.

One year in and CNIL, the respective competent authority to handle these claims in France, has spotted a common pattern on which it decided to act.

Apparently, Google has been removing links in search results from each country's own domain but leaving them intact on all other extensions.

This meant that if you wanted to dig dirt on someone, you could easily change Google's domain from .fr to .com (or anything else), and get the entire list of results, without the delisted entries.

Google, remove all links or else!

Now, CNIL has issued a 15-day notice for Google to remove links from search results that come under the Right to Be Forgotten law from all its extensions, with no exceptions.

If Google fails to comply with the notice, CNIL will then take into consideration imposing a sanction on the company, which would probably be a fine at first.

The Right to Be Forgotten law has sparked a lot of debate since its inception, but Google had to give in to the EU's decision in the end. Now, a similar law is being prepared in Russia, where the transparency of Government operations is nowhere near the one seen in EU states.