EU demands “right to be forgotten” goes international
Europe’s “right to be forgotten” has generated a lot of controversy since Google was forced to start deleting some links from its search engine. But so far the ruling has only been applied to Google’s European domains – like Google.co.uk and Google.fr for instance – which means that smarter netizens can easily sidestep any censorship.
However, Europe’s privacy regulators seem to have cottoned on to the problem. The Wall Street Journal reports they’ve agreed a new set of rules which will see the “right to be forgotten” extended to all of Google’s domains, including Google.com.
The WSJ says Europe wants to make sure there are no loopholes in the law, which mandates that Google and other search engines take down links to some websites upon user’s request. As things are now, it’s incredibly easy to view any deleted links by switching to Google.com or some other non-European domain.
There’s an awful lot of content that’s been hidden so far. After creating an online form for Europeans to request the removal of links pertaining to them, Google received some 12,000 takedown requests on the first day alone. To date, more than 174,000 people have requested the takedown of over 600,000 links.
What isn’t clear is how the EU would be able to enforce this new ruling, given that it applies to countries outside of its jurisdiction. The WSJ says Google might be able to serve up search results based on user’s IP address rather than the domain they’re using, but that method would be far from foolproof, because there are plenty of ways to mask an IP address.
