France’s privacy regulator has rejected Google’s request that it just forget about a ruling extending the “right to be forgotten” to all Google’s websites, not just those with European domain names.

The decision requires Google to close a loophole that enabled searchers to defeat a judgment by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) last year.

The CJEU recognized the right to be forgotten in May 2014, allowing people to ask search engines to not display certain links resulting from a search on their name.

The CJEU case was triggered by a Spanish lawyer asking that Google no longer respond to a search on his name with links to a years-old administrative announcement in a local newspaper concerning the court-ordered auction of his property to pay debts.

While humans would happily forgive and forget a tax debt long repayed, or other errors of judgment such as drunken antics at a party, search engines make it easy for such information to resurface in milliseconds. The right to be forgotten isn’t about erasing such traces altogether—in the Spanish case, the courts ruled that the newspaper should not delete the original announcement—but merely about making them harder to find. There’s also a public interest exception so newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens for that matter, won’t have to spend weeks combing paper archives for evidence of politicians’ past misdeeds.

Read the Full Article: Source – PC World
Browsing Privacy: (PC World) – France tells Google to remove ‘Right to be forgotten’ search results worldwide

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