[Shane R]

Privacy watchdogs in the European Union issued guidelines on Wednesday calling on the company to apply the recent “right to be forgotten” ruling to Google’s entire search empire.

Right now, the right to be forgotten ruling – which created a process for people to remove unwanted content from Google’s search results – applies only to Google’s local European sites, like Google.de in Germany. But the law is easy to get around, because to get the full list of search results all anyone has to do is perform a search on Google’s other sites, like Google.com.

The new guidelines, issued by a panel composed of the bloc’s national privacy regulators, aim to firm the law up by requiring Google and other search engines to take down links on sites outside the region as well.

“Under E.U. law, everyone has a right to data protection,” the regulatory body said in a statement on Wednesday. “Decisions must be implemented in such a way that they guarantee the effective and complete protection of data subjects’ rights and that E.U. law cannot be circumvented.”

On Wednesday, a Google spokesman said that the company had yet to review Europe’s new privacy guidelines — they will not be officially published until the end of the week — but that the company would study them carefully when they were published.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/te...mid=tw-nytimes