Europe wants to push the "right to be forgotten" rule worldwide instead of limiting it to websites within the country's borders. Regulators are said to be in the early stages of discussion, and will release new guidelines in September.
The right to be forgotten rule was officially implemented at the end of May. Google started accepting online requests from users who wanted to remove personal and sensitive information considered outdated, irrelevant and excessive from the search results. As of July 18, the company has received 90,000 requests across Europe and has accepted half of them.
But European regulators were disappointed to find out that Google only took down links from European websites, not all results on Google.com, Reuters reported. Regulators argued that Google is not supposed to localize search results, as it defeats the purpose of the rule.
"If you de-list only on Google.fr, for example, the right to be forgotten is much weaker," said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, head of France's privacy watchdog and the WP29 of EU national data protection in a meeting on Thursday.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft attended the meeting on Thursday to discuss the progress of the rule and revise the guidelines, which will be released in September.
Regulators might be forced to sue Google if the search giant doesn't comply with the request to take down links worldwide. Google refused to comment on the matter.
