French pressure monitoring Google in right "to be forgotten '

Google has to scrub search results worldwide when it agrees to the demands of users to be "forgotten", rather than only to the European versions of its website, the regulator of data protection France on Friday.

The regulator said in a statement that if Google does not comply within 15 days, you can launch a process leading to sanctions, ramping up pressure on the US giant after a landmark European legal ruling.

In May last year, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European residents can ask the search engine to clear the results that become part of a search of his name when they are out of date, irrelevant or inflammatory - the called right to oblivion.

Since then, Google and other search engines like Bing Microsoft and Yahoo have started to grant requests for delisting when certain criteria are met.

But there has been much debate on implementation, especially Google's decision only to the results of scrub European sites, leading some to resort to local regulators.

The company maintains that the decision should apply only through its European domains like Google.de Google.fr in France and in Germany.

But watchdogs data protection in the EU, many legal experts and former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser German-Schnarrenberger, who has advised Google on privacy after the European sentence, they think it must be global.

Some people have taken Google to court to try to force a change. They include Dan Shefet, a French lawyer born in Denmark, who won a libel case in a French court recently that experts say they called the results are cleared worldwide.

"According to the judgment (European Court), the CNIL considers that to be effective, delisting should be performed in all extensions of the engine and that the service provided by Google Search is a unique process," the CNIL regulator said.

France is the first country to open a potential sanctions process against Google if it does not change its position. But the CNIL's powers remain limited, since it can only impose fines of up to 150,000 euros ($ 168,000).

The Google in Mountain View, California-based had revenues of 66 billion US dollars last year.

A Google spokesman said the company had been cooperating closely with data protection authorities and was looking for the right balance in implementing the decision of the European Court.

"The ruling focused on services for European users, and that's the approach we are taking to comply with it," said the spokesman.