The only way for Google to uphold the Europeans’ right to privacy was by delisting inaccurate results popping up under name searches across all its websites.
In May 2014 the European Court of Justice ruled that people could ask search engines, such as Google and Microsoft’s Bing, to remove inadequate or irrelevant information from web results appearing under searches for people’s names, dubbed the “right to be forgotten”.
The US Internet giant has been at odds with European Union data protection authorities over the territorial scope of the ruling. Google complied, but it only scrubbed results across its European websites such as Google.de in Germany and Google.fr in France on the grounds that to do otherwise would have a chilling effect on the free flow of information.
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