Google under fire from regulators on EU privacy ruling

Google’s handling of “right to be forgotten” requests from European citizens came under fire by regulators after the search engine firm restricted the removal of Internet links to European sites only, a person familiar with the matter said.The European Union’s top court in May ruled that people have a right to request that years-old personal information that is no longer relevant be removed from Internet search results. European data protection authorities met executives from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, which operates the Bing search engine, on Thursday to discuss the implementation of the landmark ruling.

Regulators quizzed Google over its decision to remove search results only from its European search engines such as google.co.uk, which means that anyone can easily access the same information by switching to the widely used google.com, said the source, who was present at the meeting.

Google declined to comment on the details of the meeting. The search engine operators were also asked to provide more information by the end of the month on their implementation of the ruling, the source said.