Flags of the European Union / Photo: jorisvo/Shutterstock.com

In a major victory for Google, the European Union's Court of Justice has ruled that search engines do not have to remove links in so-called "right to be forgotten" cases from all its global search engine results.

The EU's highest court said that EU data protection law was not designed to be applied outside the territory of the bloc's 28 members. Search engine operators could therefore not be expected to remove links from all versions of their search engines. 

"The right to the protection of personal data is not an absolute right, but must be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights, in accordance with the principle of proportionality," the court found. 

It also said the balance between the right to privacy and the protection of personal data and the freedom of information of internet users was "likely to vary significantly around the world," so EU rules could not be applied automatically.

It added that search engine companies should take measures to prevent individuals who make searches on engines outside the EU from seeing links to information that operators have been ordered to take down. 

Peter Fleischer, Google's senior privacy counsel, welcomed the ruling, saying in a statement: "Since 2014, we've worked hard to implement the right to be forgotten in Europe, and to strike a sensible balance between people's rights of access to information, and privacy. It's good to see that the court agreed with our arguments, and we're grateful to the independent human rights organisations, media associations and many others around the world who also presented their views to the court."

The Court of Justice was ruling on two cases between Google and the French data protection authority, CNIL. 

Following the court's ruling in 2014, CNIL had ordered Google to remove links to information that breached EU data protection rules from results on all its search engines, regardless of whether the domain names were based in the EU. Google removed links only on its search engines with EU domain names. CNIL fined Google €100,000 for failing to comply with the ruling. 

In a separate case, CNIL ordered Google to take down links to websites that contained information about four individuals in the public domain and that breached EU protections on sexual activities and criminal records. 

"This is the right decision by the Court of Justice," said Richard Cumbley, a partner and global head of technology at Linklaters. "Applying this right on a global basis would have created a difficult and possibly irreconcilable clash between EU concepts of privacy and U.S. concepts of freedom of speech. It would also have encouraged other states to suppress search results on a global basis, which would have a serious impact on freedom of information."

In the three years after the ECJ ruling, Google received 2.4 million requests for links to be removed and it delisted links in 43% of requests.