EU watchdogs to apply ‘right to be forgotten’ rule on Web worldwide

European privacy regulators want search engines such as Google and Bing to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their “right to be forgotten” as ruled by a European Union court. The EU’s privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe’s supreme court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”

From the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the ‘.com’.

Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France’s privacy watchdog

Google has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website, meaning they still appear on Google.com. Wednesday’s decision was another setback for Google, which is facing multiple investigations into its privacy policy and is mired in a four-year EU antitrust inquiry. The ruling has pitted privacy advocates against free speech campaigners, who say allowing people to ask search engines to remove information would lead to a whitewashing of the past.