Google expands ‘right to be forgotten’ in Europe: What changes?

When Google was ordered to start censoring its search results for users located in Europe back in 2014, it meant that anyone who requested delisted information from any of the search giant’s European sites couldn’t access it. However, the whole system had a very big loophole. Due to this, anyone visiting Google.com received a full list of results regardless of where they were accessing the search engine from, which made the whole effort pointless after all.

From this wee though, there is going to be a change, as users within Europe to any of Google’s search engines will now be subject to the same set of restricted results.

“Starting next week, in addition to our existing practice, we will also use geolocation signals (like IP addresses) to restrict access to the delisted URL on all Google Search domains, including Google.com, when accessed from the country of the person requesting the removal,” said a blog post from Google’s global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer.

“We’ll apply the change retrospectively, to all delistings that we have already done under the European Court ruling.”We’re changing our approach as a result of specific discussions that we’ve had with EU data protection regulators in recent months,” Fleischer added.

“We’re changing our approach as a result of specific discussions that we’ve had with EU data protection regulators in recent months,” the blog post further explains.
“We believe that this additional layer of delisting enables us to provide the enhanced protections that European regulators ask us for a while also upholding the rights of people in other countries to access lawfully published information.“.

Of course, users will have the option to use VPN services and appropriate IP address to view the whole listing. For this to be implemented properly, they will need to set the right to be forgotten into effect for all the Google sites and users. It is worth mentioning that the particular procedure appears to be a painstaking one, so it will definitely take a substantial amount of time to be completed.