Google Can Limit Right to Be Forgotten to EU, Says EU Court Adviser

* Right to be forgotten isn’t global, EU court adviser
says
* Opinion, if followed by EU court, is vindication for
Google

Google shouldn’t have to apply the so-called right to be
forgotten globally, an adviser to the EU’s top court said in a
boost for the U.S. giant’s fight with a French privacy regulator
over where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of
speech.

While backing Google’s stance, Advocate General Maciej Szpunar
of the EU Court of Justice said that search engine operators must
take every measure available to remove access to links to outdated
or irrelevant information about a person on request. The
Luxembourg-based court follows such advice in a majority of its
final rulings, which normally come a few months after the
opinions.

Google has been fighting efforts led by France’s privacy
watchdog to globalize the right to be forgotten, which was created
by the EU court in a landmark ruling in 2014, without defining how,
when and where search engine operators should remove links. This
has triggered a wave of legal challenges.

The Alphabet Inc. unit currently removes such links EU-wide and
since 2016 it also restricts access to such information on non-EU
Google sites when accessed from the EU country where the person
concerned by the information is located — referred to as
geo-blocking. This approach was backed by Szpunar.

‘Global Human Rights’
“Public access to information, and the right to privacy, are
important to people all around the world, as demonstrated by the
number of global human rights, media and other organizations that
have made their views known in this case,” said Peter Fleischer,
Google’s senior privacy counsel. “We’ve worked hard to ensure that
the right to be forgotten is effective for Europeans, including
using geolocation to ensure 99 percent effectiveness.”

CNIL, France’s data privacy regulator, declined to comment.

France’s highest administrative court sought the EU tribunal’s
guidance in 2017 about whether the right to be forgotten could be
extended beyond the EU. In a second case, it asked questions about
the obligations of search engine operators when faced with
delisting requests of links to sensitive data, such as sexual
orientation, political, religious or philosophical opinions and
criminal offenses, that “is embedded in a press article or when the
content that relates to it is false or incomplete.”

‘Private Life’
The advocate general on Thursday in that case said that for
requests concerning sensitive data, search engine operators “must
weigh up, on the one hand, the right to respect for private life”
and data protection rights, and “on the other hand, the right of
the public to access the information concerned” and the freedom of
expression.

The U.S. company has been asked to delete links to 2.9 million
websites, after the EU court effectively put the search engine in
charge of deciding what requests to accept. It has agreed to less
than half of them. People unhappy with Google’s refusal to remove a
link can turn to privacy regulators.

While the right to be forgotten concerns all search engines,
Google’s dominance in Europe means the company has taken center
stage.

The cases are: C-507/17, Google (Portee territoriale du
dereferencement);C-136/17, G. C. e.a. (Dereferencement de donnees
sensibles).

Culled from bloomberg.com