EU regulators want global ‘right to forget’ from Google

Google is said to have received criticism from the European Union for the way it handles requests to remove search results. This is because deleted search results remain visible on the non-European versions of the search engine.

That is according to Reuters citing unnamed sources. The European Union is said to have held talks with Google because it would not be happy with the way search results are being made inaccessible. In Europe, individuals have the right to be forgotten if information is no longer relevant, allowing a request to be made to Google to remove a particular search result.

However, Google only does this on the European versions of its search engine, so that deleted results, for example, remain accessible via google.com. It is unclear whether Google can be obliged to make search results inaccessible on its non-European search engines, but Europe probably wants to push for this.

In addition, the European Union wants more information about how Google handles incoming takedown requests. The internet giant assesses whether the search result for which a request comes in is still socially relevant. The company also considers the reliability of the source and how old the information is when deciding whether or not to make a search result inaccessible. The European Union wants to draw up guidelines that make it clearer for Europeans on what grounds a search result can be removed.

The European Court ruled in May that individuals have the right to be forgotten and that it is therefore mandatory for search engines to remove search results if privacy is at stake. Shortly afterwards, Google put a form online with which to submit a removal request. According to the company, requests have now been received to block more than a quarter of a million Internet pages in the search results.