France fines Google over ‘right to be forgotten’

A woman holds her smart phone which displays the Google home page, in this picture illustration taken February 24, 2016.

Reuters/Eric Gaillard/Illustration

The French data protection authority fined Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) 100,000 euros ($111,720) for not scrubbing web search results widely enough in response to a European privacy ruling, the body, CNIL, said on Thursday.

“Only delisting on all of the search engine’s extensions, regardless of the extension used or the geographic origin of the person performing the search, can effectively uphold this right,” the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes said in a statement.

Google has refused to delist results from its non-European websites such as Google.com.

($1 = 0.8951 euros)

(Reporting by Julia Fioretti; Editing by Alastair Macdonald)