At the end of May, Google was forced by the EU court to allow users to take off their information from the search results, to grant and respect a “right to be forgotten”.

Google accepted the request by making available a App Formthat allows people to submit requests about links they want to be taken down.

Google will then decide if the requests, analysed individually, are reasonable attempting to “balance the privacy rights of the individual”. It is necessary to provide a photo ID and, more important, it is essential to convince Google that the search results chosen is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which [it was] processed”.

Then, according to the result of the evaluation, in case of acceptance of the request Google will remove that link from its searches, avoiding results to show up.

However, the effect of Google actions were limited to its localised versions, such as ‘Google.co.uk’ or ‘Google.es’, leaving untouched the main version ‘Google.com’. Even though most of the searches are done by localised version by default, it is easy to switch to the international version when desired.

The EU privacy regulators want now to extend the process to the international version as well, as reported on The Wall Street Journal.

The executive chairman Eric Schmidt commented on the original ruling saying that: “You have a collision between a ‘right to be forgotten’ and a right to know.”
The disagreement on the EU decision is further seen in Mr Schmidt words: “”From Google’s perspective, that’s a balance. Google believes, looking at the decision, which is binding, that the balance struck was wrong.”

What will be the final results of this quarrel is yet to be known. However, it is easy to imagine that Google will not accept that easily the new requests without fighting back.

Written by: Pietro Paolo Frigenti