Search engines do not have to remove links to personal information worldwide at the request of the subject, only in the EU, where the 'right to be forgotten' is upheld, the EU Court of Justice's advocate general said. His opinion comes in an appeal brought by Google against a decision by the French data protection regulator Cnil, which said the links to potentially damaging or no longer relevant personal information should be removed from search results worldwide at the person's request, and not just on EU domains.
Google and other search engines have largely accepted the court's 2014 ruling instituting the right to be forgotten and since then removed over 1 million such links to personal information from search results. However, the companies argue that this should only apply to search results in the EU. Taking down the links worldwide could infringe on constitutional and civil rights of people in other parts of the world where freedom of information is guaranteed.
The Cnil fined Google EUR 100,000 in March 2016 for not adhering to its decision, and Google subsequently appealed to the Council of State in France. The Council has asked the EU court for its opinion on the matter before making a ruling. The advocate general's opinion is not binding; the full EU court must still issue its opinion before the case returns to France.
The advocate general noted that the territorial application of the right to be forgotten was not defined in EU law and he did not favour trying to extend the law beyond the 28 countries in this case given the global nature of the internet. Furthermore, the right to be forgotten must be balanced with other rights, such as the rights to information, data protection and privacy. If the EU attempted to impose worldwide dereferencing of personal links, other countries could respond by blocking or withholding access for EU residents to certain information or data protections.
The opinion also backed the practice of geo-blocking for IP addresses in the EU trying to access domains outside the EU to see the blocked search results. The search engines already employ this practice.
The industry lobby group CCIA, which includes Google and other search engines, welcomed the advocate-general's "balanced" opinion and said it hopes the main court will take the same approach.
