Google Braces for Landmark Global Privacy Ruling

By Aoife White

Google is bracing for another landmark privacy decision at the European Union’s top court, five years after a “right-to-be-forgotten” ruling forced it to delete links to personal information on request.

The EU Court of Justice will rule Tuesday on the U.S. giant’s follow-up fight with a French data-protection regulator over whether the right should apply globally and where to draw the line between privacy and freedom of speech.

The Alphabet Inc. unit is challenging the French authority’s order to remove, on demand, links on all of its platforms across the world if they lead to websites that contain out of date or false information that could unfairly harm a person’s reputation. Judges may also clarify what links can stay online in the public interest.

For Google, the fate of the internet is at stake. The 2014 ruling already forces it to offer up different search results in Europe than the rest of the world. France’s CNIL says Google should purge those results globally. Google’s backers in the case, which include press freedom groups, warn this could allow authoritarian regimes to censor the entire internet by extending to the world their decision on what can be made public.

Creating a global right to be forgotten “would create a serious clash with U.S. concepts of freedom of speech” and it could also be used by other states to “suppress search results on a global basis,” according to Richard Cumbley, a lawyer at Linklaters in London.

The EU court is hard to second-guess. The initial ruling shocked Google by rejecting its arguments that the search-engine was merely a neutral pathway for serving up information. The decision effectively left it to Google to decide if a link that someone asked to be deleted contained something that was “no longer relevant.”

The court now will have to spell out how widely Google should remove the links. Should it pull links viewed in one country or across Europe? Must…

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