Last year, European citizens were granted the right to submit a request to Google for the delisting of personal information deemed to be harmful, out of date or irrelevant, through a ruling issued by the European Court of Justice. This means that the information would no longer come up in search results following searches carried out on European websites.
Since entering into effect in 2014, Google has is reported to have processed over a million of these requests, turning down the ones that were deemed to have no merit. Recently France's data regulator CNIL, has given Google a 15-day time frame within which to comply with the Court's ruling regarding certain requests that, in CNIL's opinion, should have qualified for data removal.
CNIL stated that since the ruling came into effect, it has received "hundreds" of complaints related to instances of requests for data removal that should not have been turned down by Google. The deletion of data only applies to searches conducted on European websites together with services targeted towards Europeans.
Google stated that it has worked hand in hand with data protection authorities in order to comply with the Court's ruling.
CNIL's request was where it felt that that Google should have complied and deleted the data from all search indexes and not only from on the member sites. This was however not accepted by Google.
CNIL also stated that if Google does not comply within the specified 15-day time frame, the French data regulator would have to compile a report that may lead to sanctions for Google.
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