Costeja’s victory was welcomed by a large portion of the online community. But there was a big catch: this ruling only affects countries within the European Union. Therefore, if you search for Mario Costeja González’s name using Google.com – or any other non-European search engine page, for that matter – it’s still possible to find a link to the original La Vanguardia article.
Google has since expanded its policy on deleting results: As of March 2016, search results are also deleted from international versions of Google if the search originates from the country of the person who requested the deletion. This extension is rather minor: it simply means that if someone from Germany, for example, requested to delete personal data from Google’s results pages, a person in France could still access this information using the American site, Google.com.
This ruling is currently being contested, with French data protection authorities arguing that the deletion of personal data should be applied across all Google platforms, as it is still technically accessible. Google has defended its policy, arguing that ‘one nation can’t make the laws for another country’. The court will reach its final decision in 2017.
Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is also expanding its right to be forgotten policy internationally, along the same guidelines as Google. The search engines both use geographical signals such as IP addresses. Changes also apply to deletion requests that were made in the past.