Google fined 100,000 euros in France for ‘right to forget’

The French privacy watchdog CNIL fined Google 100,000 euros for refusing to comply with the requirement to extend the right to be forgotten in non-European search engines.

The CNIL finds Google’s proposal to geofilter the ‘right to be forgotten’ on Google.com inadequate. Google wanted to use the IP address of someone searching on Google.com in order not to show certain results, namely those against which someone from that same country objected with ‘forget requests.

According to the CNIL, this method would not offer the latter any protection, because acquaintances or contacts with a non-French IP address and those from outside the EU would still see the search results against which the objection was made. Moreover, the measure would be easy to circumvent. The committee of the privacy authority has therefore imposed a fine of 100,000 euros on Google and once again determined that justified requests for forgetting to be granted to all extensions of the search engine.

Google’s claims that removal restricts freedom of expression are incorrect, according to the French authorities, because links to pages need to be removed from the results only when searching for names of the complaining party. Google has always stated that the CNIL as a French authority should not influence what people see outside of France. The company is appealing the decision.