A panel of experts appointed by Google on an European court ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling ordering removal of personal information from its search results has advised the search engine giant to limit the applications to solely European Websites.
Google’ appointed the panel that will function as an advisory committee on how to implement ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling from The EU’s supreme court. The court had ruled last year that the search engine should remove links to information that is inadequate or no longer relevant for a person’s name.
Google has been killing all links from the relevant versions of its website, but the territorial reach of the “right to be forgotten” decision from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has put the search engine at odds with the European Union’s data protection caretakers.
The territorial scope of the ruling, as well as whether Google should inform publishers that links to their content have been scrubbed, have emerged as major impasse.
Google’s advisory board members, which includes the likes of a former German justice minister and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales among others, accepted that an expansion of the ruling may boost data protection for individual users but warned that there were other issues that should be considered including laws is other countries.
“We believe that delistings applied to the European versions of search will, as a general rule, protect the rights of the data subject adequately in the current state of affairs and technology”, said the committee in its report.
