The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that tech company Google does not have to apply the right to be forgotten worldwide.
The ECJ ruling means Google is only required to remove links form s search results in Europe after receiving an appropriate request. The ruling is from a dispute between Google and French privacy regulator Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) in 2015.
CNIL ordered Google to do a global removal of search result listings to pages that contain damaging or false information about a person. In response, the company launched a geoblocking feature in 2016 that prevents European users from seeing the delisted links.
However, Google rejected the idea of censoring search results for people in other parts of the world and challenged the 100,000 euro fine being imposed by CNIL.
The ECJ ruling states that ""Currently, there is no obligation under EU law, for a search engine operator who grants a request for de-referencing made by a data subject... to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine."
Google pointed out that such an obligation could be abused by authoritarian governments trying to cover up human rights abuses if it would be applied globally. Following the ECJ ruling, Google released a statement saying "Since 2014, we've worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten in Europe, and to strike a sensible balance between people's rights of access to information and privacy. it's good to see that the court agreed with our arguments."
Several companies and groups have expressed support towards the company during the dispute, including Microsoft, Wikipedia owner the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the UK freedom of expression campaign group Article 19.
According to Google, since it started applying the right to be forgotten in May 2015, the company has received over 845,000 requests to remove a total of 3.3 million web addresses, of which around 45% have already been removed.
