Google can't seem to get away from Europe's "right to be forgotten" law, as France's data protection watchdog fined the search giant Thursday for not completely removing search engine results on its sites outside the country.
The law, issued in 2014 by Europe's top court, gives everyone with connections to Europe the ability ask Google and other search engines to remove links about themselves from online results. The ruling has received overwhelming praise from privacy advocates, as it is gives Internet users a chance to remove embarrassing posts and other "out-of-date and irrelevant" results from sites like Facebook.
While Google initially only removed "right to be forgotten" requested results from its French domain since European Union laws don't apply anywhere else, France noted how easy it would be find the information on a different site, leading the country to order the company to delete them through all of its domains.
Google tried to meet France halfway by getting rid of results around the world as long as it could confirm, through geolocation, that the searches were made in France, but the country rejected this plan, resulting in a fine of 100,000 euros ($112,000).
The Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), France's privacy regulator, said Thursday that applying its ruling on a global scale is the only way that its citizens' rights could be protected.
"For people residing in France to effectively exercise their right to be delisted, it must be applied to the entire processing operation, i.e. to all of the search engine's extensions," the agency said in a statement.
Google plans on appealing the decision, as it claims to have adopted Europe's privacy ruling for all of its European operations.
"We disagree with the CNIL's assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France," the search giant said in a statement.
The fine shouldn't pose too much of a problem for Google, as the company makes $75 billion a year.
France's decision is the latest hurdle that Google has to overcome in the "right to be forgotten" issue, as the company is dealing with antitrust investigations in Europe over whether it favored some of its own services over those of competitors, and a ruling on these charges is expected from Europe's competition officials over the next few months.
However, Google did make some progress last month when it agreed to block access to certain disputed links from all of its domains, among them being Google.com in the U.S., when those sites were accessed in Europe.
