Dive Brief:
- In European countries, Google will now clean search results across all its websites when accessed from a European country, according to a Reuters report.
- The data scrub is the outcome of a battle with the European Union data protection authorities over the "right to be forgotten." In 2014, the EU Court of Justice mandated that people could ask for search engines to remove irrelevant information that appears under a person's name.
- In September the French data protection authority threatened to fine Google if it did not revise its policy and scrub results globally across all of its websites.
Dive Insight:
Google originally said it would only scrub search results on European domains, but has now extended that to include anyone conducting a search from an EU IP address.
People accessing Google from outside Europe will not be affected by the change, a person close to the company said to Reuters. The company's plans to base filtered search results on a person's IP address.
The European Commission and the United States agreed upon a new data pact earlier this month. The EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, a successor to the Safe Harbour agreement, created a new transatlantic data transmission framework and mandates U.S. companies offer stronger protection for Europeans' personal data.
