French Official Campaigns to Make 'Right to be Forgotten' Global

Europe is pressing for its ‘‘right to be forgotten’’ ruling to go global.

The privacy decision, which allows individuals to ask that links leading to information about themselves be removed from search engine results, has been gaining traction worldwide ever since European officials released guidelines that demanded Google and others apply the ruling across their entire search empires. Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, who heads the French data protection authority and has campaigned heavily for expanding the ruling, defended European efforts to force search engines to apply the ruling to search results outside of Europe. The expansion of the ruling beyond Europe’s borders has raised questions over whether the region’s regulators would be able to enforce the decision in other jurisdictions like the US, which do not have the same privacy rules.