French Official Campaigns to Make 'Right to Be Forgotten' Global

The privacy decision, which allows individuals to ask that links leading to information about themselves be removed from search engine results, has been gaining traction worldwide since European officials released guidelines last week that demanded Google and others apply the ruling across their entire search empires.

And Wednesday, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads the French data protection authority and has campaigned heavily for expanding the ruling, defended European efforts to force search engines to apply the ruling to search results outside of Europe.

Currently, Google, which controls about 80 percent of Europe's search market, removes links only from its local domains, like Google.fr in France and Google.de in Germany, while other domains, like Google.com, are not affected. That allows individuals - both in European and farther afield - to sidestep Europe's privacy rules as long as they use a non-European search domain.

But Falque-Pierrotin, who also heads a European body composed of the region's 28 national privacy regulators, said Google must remove links globally and not just from its European domains, adding that such a step was essential to protect every European's right to privacy.

''For Google, the answer is worldwide,'' said Falque-Pierrotin, when questioned about the scope of the European ruling. ''If people have the right to be delisted from search results, then that should happen worldwide.''

The expansion of the ruling beyond Europe's borders has raised questions over whether the region's regulators would be able to enforce the decision in other jurisdictions like the United States, which do not have the same privacy rules.

Yet Falque-Pierrotin defended Europe's efforts, saying that as long as a European resident had requested that online links be removed, then any search engine must comply with that decision across the globe.

''The location of the search user, not the search engine, is the most important,'' Falque-Pierrotin, who added that her agency had received roughly 100 complaints from French residents about how their "right to be forgotten" requests had been handled by Google.

''Now that we have the guidelines, we'll start to investigate each case,'' she said, in reference to policies that Europe's privacy chief announced last week.

Under the current rules, individuals must first submit requests to Google about links that they want removed from online search results. So far, the search giant has received almost 180,000 requests and has removed about 41 percent of these links, according to the company's transparency report. If individuals are not satisfied with Google's response, they can ask a country's data regulator to intervene.

Ever since Europe's highest court made the privacy ruling in May, Google has fought to limit the impact of the decision to its European operations, where an individual's right to privacy is often on par with freedom of expression. The opposite is true in the United States.

© 2014 New York Times News Service