Google Partially Caves To French Demands For More Global Censorship Of 'Forgotten' Links

from the disappointing dept

For a while now we've been highlighting the problems of Europe's "Right to be Forgotten" concept as it applies to search results. The idea is that, rather than a search engine, Europe thinks of companies like Google as creating something of a "dossier" on individuals, over which they should be able to delete old or irrelevant "data." This means that, in the EU, people can apply to Google to "de-link" certain stories that they consider to no longer be relevant, even if those stories are 100% accurate and true. Not surprisingly, given a chance to "delink" yourself from truthful information has resulted in lots and lots of people demanding Google "forget" links about them. Google now has a process to go through these, and certainly has rejected many requests, but it still appears to accept many requests that appear to be obviously bogus attempts to hide information someone just dislikes.

Last summer, French regulators decided that Google wasn't doing enough, and that Google needed to not just censor links on Google's EU domains, but globally. Google responded, noting that this was highly problematic, given that the EU did not have jurisdiction over the globe, and France basically responded with a "shut up, do it anyway."

And now it appears that Google has gone back to the French regulators with a partial solution. While some have said it means that Google will, in fact, start "forgetting" links globally, that does not appear to be the case from looking at the details. Instead, it looks like Google will now try to block based on where Google thinks users are coming from, rather than which Google domain they're using. This is a subtle difference which, in most cases, may not be different at all. That is, when you visit Google from a variety of countries, Google already tries to geolocate you, and will often redirect you to the "local" version of the search engine -- such as Google.fr in France.

Under the current RTBF system, Google removes those links on the specific searches if you're on such an EU domain. However, if you're in France and you force your browser to visit Google.com, the same links would not be missing. So the "compromise" is that now Google will remove the links based on where it thinks you physically are, even if you force your browser to visit a non-local domain name. This will not really impact that many people -- just those who force Google to visit a different domain than their local domain. But, still, it's a further compromise and a move towards greater censorship of accurate link results. Of course, what's stupid is that basically anyone who knows enough to force Google to not use a local domain probably also knows how to use a VPN or proxy to appear to be coming from outside Europe.

Still, the big question now is whether or not French regulators will find this an "acceptable" compromise, or if they will continue to insist on global censorship over accurate information in an effort to suppress truthful information.

Filed Under: eu, france, global search, jurisdiction, links, right to be forgotten, search
Companies: google