‘Google goes right to be forgotten with geofiltering’

Google will also filter results on google.com that have been removed for privacy reasons. The company will do this by checking from which country a user is accessing the site. Until now, only results were removed on national Google pages.

A Google spokesperson has confirmed that the company will introduce the new measure this month, according to the newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine. Last year, the search engine refused to filter results worldwide. Until now, therefore, results that could not be seen on google.nl or google.fr, for example, were shown on google.com. The right to be forgotten was therefore not an effective measure, according to privacy watchdogs, because many Europeans use the international version of the site.

Google will now check google.com on the basis of IP addresses whether the user is from Europe and filter results based on that. One of Google’s arguments in the earlier refusal was that, for example, American users would also be affected by the filters. With this solution, however, that is no longer the case. This form of geofiltering remains easy to circumvent with VPN services, but the measure may be effective for most European users.

The right to be forgotten stemmed from a 2014 ruling by the European Court of Justice. Based on that ruling, search engines must remove search results relating to a person on request if they are incorrect, no longer current or no longer relevant. The ruling is seen by some as a privacy victory and by others as a form of censorship.