Google Fined by French Privacy Regulator

Google is once again in trouble with Europe’s authorities about privacy.

The company was fined $112,000 on Thursday by France’s data protection watchdog for failing to comply with demands to extend a European privacy ruling across its global domains, including Google.com in the United States.

The financial penalty — a paltry sum compared to Google’s $75 billion in annual revenue — relates to the “right to be forgotten” ruling issued in 2014 by Europe’s top court. The ruling allows anyone with connections to Europe to ask search engines like Google to remove links about themselves from online results.

Google has fought hard to limit the legal decision to its European operations like Google.fr in France, saying that applying the ruling worldwide would infringe people’s freedom of expression.

But French privacy regulators, among others, have demanded that the company apply the “right to be forgotten” across its global domains to comply with Europe’s tough data protection rules that enshrine an individual’s privacy as a fundamental human right.

On Thursday, France’s privacy regulator said its citizens’ rights could be upheld only if the European privacy decision was applied globally, and that Google had failed to remove — or “delist” — links from search results outside the European Union.

"For people residing in France to effectively exercise their right to be delisted, it must be applied to the entire processing operation, i.e. to all of the search engine’s extensions,” the agency, known as the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés, or CNIL, said in a statement.

Google said that it would appeal the decision, adding that it had adopted Europe’s privacy ruling across its European operations.

"We disagree with the CNIL’s assertion that it has the authority to control the content that people can access outside France,” the Silicon Valley company said in a statement.

Google is facing the new regulatory headache as it also grapples with antitrust investigations in Europe over whether it unfairly favored some of its own online services over those of rivals. Europe’s competition officials are expected to rule on those charges in the coming months. Google is also facing a separate investigation into whether its Android smartphone operating system may have breached the region’s antitrust rules.

Google has pushed back at some of the charges, particularly connected to the competition investigations, where the company may face billions of dollars in fines if found to have breached local rules.

Yet in the privacy case, Google agreed last month to block access to certain disputed links from all of its domains — including the main United States one, Google.com — when those sites were accessed from Europe.

That represented a significant change from Google’s previous efforts to limit the “right to be forgotten” ruling after a number of European national privacy regulators expressed concerns that their citizens’ rights were not protected.

Despite this olive branch, Google was unable to convince French authorities that it was now in compliance with the country’s privacy rules.

Google’s proposed solution, France’s privacy regulator said on Thursday, “does not give people effective protection of their right to be delisted.”