Google will review its ‘right to be forgotten’ policies in Europe, following the release later this month of a report by an EU advisory council.
The search engine is currently deleting details on individuals from European domains, but retaining them on its global engines, thus making the information still available on the web against guidelines issued by EU regulators.
Google chief legal officer David Drummond told Reuters that the search firm has not changed its approach since November, but would re-evaluate it after the report is published.
"We’ve had a basic approach, we’ve followed it, on this question we’ve made removals Europe-wide but not beyond," Drummond added.
Last May, a top court in Europe issued a ruling that individuals can have ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant’ data removed from search results.
Google argued that the ruling must apply only to its websites in the European continent, including Germany’s Google.de and France’s Google.fr.
However, privacy regulators from the EU countries are demanding search engines to clean results globally, as it is very easy to switch from an European domain to Google.com.
Since the implementation of right to be forgotten in May, Google alleged that alongside requests that failed to offer required context, individuals have also been seeking the removal of links of their namesakes.
The company has also informed the chair of the EU’s Article 29 Working Party about the issues in complying with requests to eliminate news links considered ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant’.
