Google changes how it scrubs 'right to be forgotten' people
Where you search from will impact the results you see.
Google confirmed today that it is adjusting how it handles "right to be forgotten" requests from EU citizens. Since 2014, when EU's Court of Justice established its "right to be forgotten" law, Google has been scrubbing information deemed "inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive and in the public interest" from its European servers. That means if someone in France makes a delisting request, Google will scrub that info from Google.fr, Google.uk and the rest -- but not from its global Google.com.
However, starting next week, Google will delist people from all of its domains, including Google.com. But there's a catch. Google will employ geolocation (ie the searcher's IP address) to determine whether or not to display information that would have been otherwise scrubbed. That is, searching for a French person's delisted information from America will return different (and additional) results than if you searched for the French person's information from within France itself.
This policy is ludicrously stupid because VPN but you can't fault Google for giving the EU court exactly what it asked for. They're obeying the letter of the law, if not the spirit.
