Following a series of pressures by European regulation and privacy authorities, Google will soon start removing unwanted results from all of its domains. Despite having complied with the EU’s rules regarding the so-called ‘right to be forgotten‘ act, the search giant has so far only removed the results within the specific country’s domain.
That means that until now, were a French citizen to ask for a particular result to be removed if found under their name, Google would only scrub it under the local version of the website – google.fr in this case. Results on google.com, on the other hand, would be unaffected.
According to the BBC, starting mid-February, results will be omitted completely whenever an European IP address is detected – so long as the search is made within the country where the removal request has been filed.
This is just the latest development in a series of issues Google has had to face with several EU data protection authorities since May 2014, when the European Court of Justice first asked the tech firm (as well as Microsoft with Bing) to delete “irrelevant” or “inadequate” information from their search results if asked by European citizens.
In addition to that, during an interview today with the UK Parliament’s Public Account Committee regarding the £130m tax deal with HM Revenue and Customs, Google’s President for Europe, Middle East and Africa Matt Brittin claimed he “does not know how much he gets paid” while grilled by MPs.
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