Although the European Union could claim the 'Right to be forgotten' law to be somewhat of a victory for privacy advocates everywhere in the union, it would seem that the EU is not yet done tweaking and advising on further steps that need to be taken in order for it to be truly effective for its citizens.
European Watchdog, the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) released a report on Wednesday further advising that results removed from European search domains should be extended to the worldwide search results, or Google.com in particular. Right now, when a request 'to be forgotten' is removed from google.co.uk for example, the same search result will still appear on google.com, and that finding by the watchdog has been deemed unacceptable in the pdf report.
The meat of the report clearly states this (bolded for emphasis):
The WP29 considers that in order to give full effect to the data subject’s rights as
defined in the Court’s ruling, de-listing decisions must be implemented in such a way that
they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects’ rights and
that EU law cannot be circumvented. In that sense, limiting de-listing to EU domains
on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains
cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data
subjects according to the ruling. In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant .com domains.
The Inquirer asked Google for comment on the report, and they received the following response, "We haven't yet seen the WP29 guidelines, but we will study them carefully when they're published,"
Google has already removed tens of thousands of links since requests could be submitted from May this year and if this report has any bearing at all, Google may be required to remove a whole lot more.
Source: EU Commission via The Inquirer | Image: Huffington Post
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