A two-day meeting attended by the European Union's data protection regulators has ended with the drafting of a new set of guidelines on the coverage of the "Right to be Forgotten" ruling involving Google.
The new privacy guidelines, which are scheduled to be officially published on Nov. 28, will push Google and other search engines to extend beyond the region when they bring down the requested links for removal.
Currently, the "Right to be Forgotten" ruling applies only to the local European sites of Google such as Google.de in Germany and Google.fr in France. However, anyone can easily bypass the ruling and get the full list of search results by performing a search on the company's other sites such as Google.com.
"Limiting de-listing to EU domains on the grounds that users tend to access search engines via their national domains cannot be considered a sufficient means to satisfactorily guarantee the rights of data subjects according to the ruling," stated European data protection authorities in a press release. "In practice, this means that in any case de-listing should also be effective on all relevant .com domains."
In May, Google chairman Eric Schmidt argued that the ruling made by the EU's top court didn't have to be extended to the U.S. site. The ruling has called for the company to cut the search links connected to private individuals after the material is deemed irrelevant or outdated.
EU regulators reiterated that the blocked information on EU websites should also become inaccessible even when one visits Google in other countries.
"Under EU law, everyone has a right to data protection," said the regulatory body. "Decisions must be implemented in such a way that they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects' rights and that E.U. law cannot be circumvented."
Out of the 502,977 evaluated links, Google has removed 208,520 links or 41.5 percent since the EU court ruling was issued in May. The latest transparency report also states that the company has received 174,226 removal requests.
In essence, the guidelines presented are not legally binding. It's also unclear if Google will abide by them. A Google spokesman said that the company would definitely study the guidelines carefully once they become published officially.
"We haven't yet seen the Article 29 Working Party's guidelines, but we will study them carefully when they're published," said Al Verney, Google spokesman, in an email.
