Google Wins EU Court Fight Making It Harder to Be Forgotten

Google Wins EU Court Fight Making It Harder to Be Forgotten
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Google won a European Union court battle against plans to impose a global “right to be forgotten“, according to Bloomberg. It is the latest landmark ruling over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech.

The EU Court of Justice said search engines should remove results on European versions of its websites and weren’t required to scrub links globally. Five years earlier the same tribunal forced the U.S. tech giant to remove European links to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation. The ruling is binding and can’t be appealed.

The Alphabet unit challenged the French privacy authority’s order to extend the scope to all of its platforms across the world. In a related ruling on how far Google could cite the public interest to refuse to pull links, judges said the search engine must weigh privacy concerns against users’ right to know in each individual case.

“This ruling is a victory for global freedom of expression,“ said Thomas Hughes of Article 19, a human rights campaign group that supported Google in the case. “Courts or data regulators in the U.K,, France or Germany should not be able to determine the search results that internet users in America, India or Argentina get to see.“

Google had argued that such decisions to make search results disappear pushes the internet into dangerous waters. The 2014 judgment already forces it to offer up different links on European searches than in other regions. The search-engine giant and its supporters, including press freedom groups, have warned that internet freedom would be brushed aside if less democratic parts of the world embraced the same policy and won the right to remove search results globally.

Google is now effectively required to block European users’ access to outlawed links. It must now “effectively prevent or, at the very least, seriously discourage an Internet user“ seeking information that should be hidden to protect a person’s privacy, the court said. National tribunals must weigh if Google goes far enough with so-called geoblocking efforts to prevent viewers from one location seeing such links.

Still, the court didn’t give Google a blanket right to shrug off European requests for global deletions. European authorities could still potentially order a link to be removed on all versions of a search engine after balancing privacy rights versus the right to freedom of information.