European regulators have not yet decided whether to try to force search engines such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing to scrub results globally when people invoke their “right to be forgotten” in the region.
The European Union’s top court ruled in May that search engines must take down certain results shown under a search of a person’s name if the information was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”.
Although the “right to be forgotten” existed as a concept in European law, the ruling marked the first time companies like Google have been asked to field such requests from the public.
The ruling forced web companies into the uncomfortable position of making judgment calls on individual cases, balancing rights to personal privacy against the freedom of information.
Google’s approach to date has been to remove links only from European versions of its website, such as Google.de in Germany or Google.co.uk in Britain, meaning they would still appear on Google.com.
Microsoft and Yahoo have not yet said how they will handle the issue.
Some national regulators and lawyers have said Google’s approach waters down the effectiveness of the ruling given how easy it is to switch between the different versions.
