Google in Europe

Over the last four years, Google has been targeted by EU regulators on a number of matters – copyright, privacy, the right to be forgotten and taxation.  Now members of the European Parliament have overwhelmingly voted to separate search engines from other commercial services.

Europe and the right to be forgotten

The European Commission has published guidelines to help search engines handle right to be forgotten requests. A balance has to be achieved between the public’s right to now and individual privacy requirements.

Since the right to be forgotten came into force in May 2014, Google has received approximately 160,000 right to be forgotten requests.  At the moment, the right to be forgotten requests are applied across European websites, such as Google.Fr of Google.de.   Now the EU wants to extend the range and impact of the right to be forgotten to include .com domains.

Under the current arrangements, users may have started to use “Google more flexibly” – moving onto Google.com if they are unable to find what they are looking for on a European site.  A group of EU privacy regulators will publish guidelines for search engines to help them implement such a search strategy.

Microsoft Bing has also started to process right to be forgotten requests. It is using EU advice as its template.

Sources: Bitter Wallet; Reuters; TheNextWeb; Social Media Today; The New Yorker; engadget; ITProPortal; SearchEngineLand.