France: Google fights Right-to-Be-Forgotten fine at top court

Google has taken a fight against France’s privacy watchdog to the country’s highest administrative court, challenging a March decision to fine it 100,000 euros for failing to remove “right-to-be-forgotten” requests from global search results.

“As a matter of both law and principle, we disagree with this demand,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel said in a blog post Thursday. “We comply with the laws of the countries in which we operate. But if French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries — perhaps less open and democratic — start demanding that their laws regulating information likewise have global reach?”

CNIL, the French data protection commission, levied the fine on Alphabet Inc.’s Google in March after a tussle that started with a 15-day ultimatum last year for the Mountain View, California-based company to comply with the order. The French probe was triggered by several complaints from people who wanted the search engine to delete search results that pointed to personal information about them. While Google removed links from its French “.fr” domain, it didn’t take them off the “.com” domain visible to European web users.

The European Union’s highest court in a precedent-setting rulingin May 2014 created a right to be forgotten — allowing people to seek the deletion of links on search engines if the information was outdated or irrelevant. The case provoked a furor, with Google creating a special panel to advise it on implementing the law. The group opposed applying the ruling beyond EU domains.

Full Content: Bloomberg

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