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Google’s “Right To Be Forgotten” Censorship Of Search Results

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On March.4th 2016 Google confirmed that search results will be censored for countries that are protected by the “Right To Be Forgotten” which is a mandate established by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014. The mandate allows Europeans to ask search engines to delist certain links from the search results generated by a search query for their personal name.

Beginning this week, Google will now censor removed content globally for anything that has been removed under the EU’s mandate. The global censorship however only applies to search queries originating from an EU country that originally made the request.

 

Here’s how it works

Let’s say that an individual in Germany creates a Right To Be Forgotten request to have a search result including their name removed. If the request is approved the censorship will work as follow.

  • The search result will not be censored for people within the EU but outside of Germany that use non-European Google versions.
  • The search result will not be censored for people outside of the EU on any Google version.
  • The search result will be censored on EVERY version of Google within Germany.
  • The search result will be censored for everybody in the EU that uses a European Google version.

This means the censorship only really applies to people searching from inside of a country where the Right To Be Forgotten request was actually granted, regardless of what Google version they are using the removed search results will not appear for related search queries.

For those outside of the European Union, no censorship will currently exist, so technically it’s not worldwide censorship as someone from within a censored country where the removal request was granted could still access the removed search results by using a VPN (virtual private network) to mask their real location.

This change is an attempt to address the EU’s concerns that the previous censorship update from Google didn’t actually accomplish anything as a person could simply visit any non-EU version of Google and still fully access the censored search results.