European privacy working group wants to extend the right to be ‘forgotten’

European privacy regulators believe that the European right to be forgotten should become stricter. For example, search engines such as Google should also filter search results on non-European websites.

It concerns the so-called Article 29 working group, or WP29, of the European Commission, which has drawn up guidelines based on the recent decision of the European Court that citizens have the right to be ‘forgotten’ in search engines. The guidelines in question are a practical implementation of the recent Court ruling stating that search results must be removed if the privacy of individuals is at stake or the content is no longer ‘relevant’.

In a released press release, the group states that “forgetting” certain search results must be done completely; this means, among other things, that a search engine such as Google must make approved removal requests on all of its websites, not just its European sites. A spokesperson confirmed to Reuters that the privacy working group wants Google to filter search results on its .com domain. Incidentally, the supervisors had already requested this before.

The full guidelines drawn up by the European privacy working group will be published on Thursday or Friday. A Google spokesperson said it would study the guidelines closely, but did not comment further. The Court’s ruling on the right to be forgotten has already caused a lot of discussion because it was not yet clear how exactly this should be put into practice.