14 DAY TRIAL // Reports coming out of Google's offices are saying that the company will change how it applies the Right-To-Be-Forgotten Law (RTBFL) inside European countries.
In May 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union voted to implement the Right-To-Be-Forgotten Law as a way for individuals to request search engines to remove links that are no longer of public interest, infringe on someone's privacy, or are deemed harmful or abusive.
From the get-go, Google was never cooperative and tried to dodge censoring its content by finding various loopholes into how the RTBFL decision would be "technically" implemented.
RTBFL was never implemented in the right way
Until now, whenever a person requested a link to be removed from search results for specific search terms, Google would comply and remove the desired links, but only after its own review process (which sometimes denied applications this right), and only inside the user's local Google domain.
This meant that if a Danish wanted to remove a link from Google's search results, the link would be removed only in Google.dk, but not on the company's other country domains, or generic .com domain.
A person in Denmark that wanted to search dirty secrets about their friends would only need to access the Google.com domain and search from there.
Pressure from French regulators forced Google to reconsider
The first ones to spot this issue were CNIL, France's user privacy watchdog, who threatened to fine Google if the company did not remove RTBFL links from all domains.
After lengthy negotiations with CNIL and other European regulators, Google seems to be ready to do so, as Reuters reports.
The company's leadership is preparing to implement a location-based filtering system, which would remove RTBFL links from all of Google's domains, not just local ones.
As for our previous example, all links Google was asked to remove in Denmark would be unavailable on all domains when accessed from Denmark. If you want to learn their friends' secrets, users would have to travel to a neighboring country to do so or change their IP via proxies.
This implementation is in the spirit of the Right-To-Be-Forgotten Law and is what Google should have done from the beginning.