25 September 2015.
The French privacy watchdog the CNIL has said it will impose fines of up to 300,000 Euros, equivalent to around 335,000 US dollars, against Google unless the search engine immediately complies with the CNIL's demands regarding the “right to be forgotten”, after it rejected Google's appeal against the demands.
In July, the CNIL ordered Google to remove links from all of its domains under the “EU right to be forgotten” law.
The “right to be forgotten” law means that EU citizens can ask Google to remove links to webpages containing incorrect or outdated information about them if these results appear when the person's name is typed into the search engine.
Google has been complying with these requests, but has only been removing links concerning French individuals from its google.fr search results. The links still appear if you search for the person's name using any other Google domain, including google.com.
In mid-June, the French data watchdog ruled that this practice was unlawful. Following the CNIL's rejection of Google's appeal, the search giant must now either comply or be hit with the fines.Â
