In Europe, You’ll Need a VPN to See Real Google Search Results
You’ve got a blind date tonight and you want to find out more about the person you’re meeting. So you tap their name into Google to see if any red flags show up. But if you want to see the really juicy stuff and you live in the European Union, chances are better than ever you won’t find the links you’re looking for—unless you use the same kind of surreptitious service that lets people in China access banned websites.
That’s the latest effect of Europe’s so-called “right to be forgotten” rules. First passed in 2014, the EU law states that companies like Google have a responsibility to remove personal information about individuals from their search engines, so long as that information is not of public interest and is “inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive.” In practice, this means that Google and other search engines must remove links to pages, such as news sites, at the request of people who don’t want particular information about themselves known.
