Google Pushed to Extend ‘Forgotten’ Requests to U.S. site

By Stephanie Bodoni  

Google Inc. (GOOGL) will have to change its practice and apply the right to be forgotten to its websites beyond the European Union under rules drafted by the EU’s data protection chiefs.
“All the extensions are included, including the .com,” Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, head of the EU group of 28 privacy watchdogs, told reporters in Brussels today.
Data protection regulators after a two-day meeting issued the guidelines, which will push the Mountain View, California-based company to apply privacy requests from EU residents to its primary Google.com site in the U.S. primary Google.com site in the U.S. The guidelines also rebuke the owner of the world’s most-used search engine for routinely notifying media about story links it has removed.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said last month that a May ruling by the EU’s top court, in which it ordered search links tied to individuals cut when those people contend the
material is irrelevant or outdated, didn’t need to be extended to the U.S. site. Google.com gets fewer than 5 percent of user searches in Europe, the European Commission has said.
The guidelines apply to search links on Google sites outside the bloc that are still viewable in the EU. Regulators have complained that information blocked on EU websites shouldn’t be easily accessible by visiting Google in other countries by changing a few characters on the browser address line.
In practice, data regulators “assume there should be a link between the data subject and the EU, which means we will deal first with European residents,” said Falque-Pierrotin. “It means a Chinese in Hong Kong without any link to the EU won’t benefit from this right.”
Recommendations by the regulators, known as the Article 29 Working Party, reflect the positions of the national officials that make up the group. While the EU group’s opinions aren’t binding, they could eventually lead to fines at the national level.