Google has changed its logo's font to a simpler style, and made its mini logo uppercase and colorful. (Photo : Facebook)
You can now force Google to forget you anywhere in the world. That is if you are a French citizen. This is the implication of the denial of Google's appeal on the decision of Europe's highest court.
France's Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, (C.N.I.L) rejected Google's appeal. The search giant said that the ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) should be limited to Google.fr in France and to Google.de in Germany. It argued, "that it would impede the public’s right to information and would be a form of censorship."
In May 2014, Google suffered a major blow on its dominance in European countries like France and Germany where it commands a virtual monopoly on searches.
The European Court of Justice issued a ground breaking decision that citizens of the European Union has the right to be forgotten, effectively giving anyone an actionable right to demand Google to "delist" search results that they find objectionable after a lapse of certain time.
A full year after the decision, the President of CNIL. had put Google on notice to proceed delisting from all of its search engine domain, after Google only processed delisting request from its search engine within the European domain.
In a statement, CNIL said, "Google received several tens of thousands of requests from French citizens. It delisted some results on the European extensions of the search engine (.fr; .es; .co.uk; etc.). However, it has not proceeded with delisting on other geographical extensions or on google.com, which any internet user may alternatively visit."
But C.N.I.L. said that the right is not absolute. In particular, when the delisting involved is a public person, the exercise of such right will be under the double supervision of the CNIL and the ECJ.
Now, Google must comply with the denial of its appeal or face sanctions. But this does not mean the information, removed from Google's search results, will be deleted from the Internet. It may still be directly accessed on the website where the information is stored. You just have to access it without Google.
