Google's right-to-be-forgotten appeal rejected.

• Position: PRIVACY

The French data regulator has rejected Google's appeal against the global enforcement of "right to be forgotten" (RTBF) removals. RTBF allows individuals to request that information about them be erased from Internet records.

In May, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) ordered Google to apply RTBF removals not only to the company's European domains such as google.co.uk or google.fr, but also to the search engine's global domain google.com.

Google filed an informal appeal in July to the president of CNIL, Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, arguing that it would impede the public's right to information, would be a form of censorship, and would have a chilling effect on the Internet.

Falque-Pierrotin rejected the appeal, stating that once a delisting has been accepted under the RTBF ruling it must be applied across all extensions of the search engine and that not doing so allows the ruling to be easily circumvented, the Guardian reported.

CNIL said in a statement: "Contrary to what Google has stated, this decision does not show any willingness on the part of the CNIL to apply French law extraterritorially. It simply requests full observance of European legislation by non-European players offering their services...