European privacy regulators want Internet search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing to scrub results globally, not just in Europe, when people invoke their "right to be forgotten" as ruled by an EU court. The European Union's privacy watchdogs agreed on a set of guidelines on Wednesday to help them implement a ruling from Europe's supreme court that gives people the right to ask search engines to remove personal information that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant". Google, which dominates Internet searches in Europe, has been scrubbing results only from the European versions of its website such as Google.de in Germany or Google.fr in France, meaning they still appear on Google.com. "From the legal and technical analysis we are doing, they should include the '.com'," said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, the head of France's privacy watchdog and the Article 29 Working Party of EU national data protection authorities, at a news conference. A Google spokesman did not immediately have any comment. The company previously said that it believed search results should be removed only from its European versions since Google automatically redirects people to the local versions of its search engine.
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--- Reuters
