eco welcomes Google’s fight against the financial penalty imposed by the French data protection authority CNIL. “The ruling of the European Court of Justice two years ago on the “right to be forgotten” left numerous important questions unanswered ”, Oliver Süme, eco Director of Policy and Law, criticized. This lawsuit could help finally clear up some of the critical issues.
In May 2016, Google submitted an official complaint about the EUR 100,000 fine imposed by CNIL for refusing to remove links globally. Now the French Council of State (Conseil d´État) must rule on the dispute.
“Data protection is important and good”, Süme stressed. “However, it needs to be proportionate. The French data protection authority’s demand crosses a line. A consistent global implementation of the right to removal could easily lead to a race to the bottom. The legal interpretation of the country with the lowest level of protection could become the standard in the balance between freedom of expression and data protection. However, it cannot be the case that one country can decide what can be read in another.”
The European Court of Justice ruled in May 2014 that search engines such as Google must remove links from their search results on request, if those links lead to content that infringes personal rights. Google not only deletes links on national sites such as google.fr, but also on google.com, insofar as the search request can be seen to originate from the country in which the removal request was made. The French data protection agency would like relevant links to be removed globally.
