LONDON — A French court ruled Wednesday that Google must remove from its Internet search results all images of a former Formula One car racing chief at an orgy. The ruling in the privacy case could have ramifications for the tech giant’s operations across Europe.
Max Mosley, the former president of the International Automobile Federation, had filed the lawsuit in September to force Google to automatically filter from its search engine links to images from a British newspaper report in 2008 that included photos and a video of Mr. Mosley participating in a sadomasochistic sex party.
The former Formula One head successfully sued the News of the World in a London court for breach of privacy and was awarded £60,000, or about $96,000, in damages.
On Wednesday, the Tribunal de Grande Instance in Paris backed Mr. Mosley’s attempts to force Google to block references to the images from appearing in Google’s search results worldwide. The company said it would appeal the decision.
Mr. Mosley argued that French law makes it illegal to take and distribute images of an individual in a private space without that person’s permission. But Google said that would limit freedom of speech, forcing the company to block search results without any person or court overseeing the context in which the images appeared.
Analysts said the ruling against Google could lead to greater restrictions on what was accessible through search results and could prompt more people to demand that the United States technology company remove references to their private activities.
“At this point in time, the pendulum is swinging toward individuals’ privacy and away from freedom of speech,” said Carsten Casper, a privacy and security analyst at the consulting firm Gartner in Berlin.
The ruling represents the latest effort by privacy advocates in Europe to limit how individuals’ data is disseminated online.
European policy makers already are working on new regulations that would restrict how companies use and share consumers’ information, particularly with firms outside of the European Union.
As part of the settlement ordered by the French court on Wednesday, Google will have to filter out nine images of Mr. Mosley from its worldwide search results. The company must pay him 1 euro in compensation and it will be fined 1,000 euros every time that an image is found through its search engine, starting at the beginning of next year.
“It’s a fair decision,” said Clara Zerbib, a lawyer at the law firm Reed Smith in Paris who represented Mr. Mosley in the lawsuit. “This case isn’t about censoring information, but about complying with French law.”
Mr. Mosley has won a previous court case in France, which ruled that the recording of the images connected to the British newspaper story was illegal.
Google said that it already had removed from its search results hundreds of images that violated that ruling. The firm also has said that any filter would not stop the images from being accessible online by individuals who visited websites where the photos were available.
“This is a troubling ruling with serious consequences for free expression and we will appeal it,” Google’s associate general counsel, Daphne Keller, said in a statement. “The French court has instructed us to build what we believe amounts to a censorship machine.”
Mr. Mosley has filed a similar lawsuit against Google in Germany, and a decision in that case is expected early next year.
The lawsuits relate to a 2008 report in The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which was later closed because of its ties to a phone hacking scandal. The article described Mr. Mosley’s activities as a “sick Nazi orgy.” The allegations were particularly damaging, as Mr. Mosley is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, a pre-World War II-era British fascist, and Mr. Mosley had sought to distance himself from his father’s activities.
By pursuing legal action in France and Germany, Mr. Mosley was taking advantage of more stringent data privacy legislation in those countries compared with either the United States or Britain, according to privacy analysts. In France, for example, it is a criminal offense to record someone else without his or her consent in a private space.
Google is facing a number of privacy lawsuits in Europe.
The tech giant is currently defending itself at the European Court of Justice over a Spanish man’s efforts to erase some controversial information about himself from the web. The case, expected to be decided by the end of the year, focuses on individuals’ so-called right to be forgotten on the Internet.
In a sign that the European Court of Justice could side with Google in the Spanish case, a Finnish lawyer who serves as advocate general to the European court said earlier this year that search engines are not responsible for information appearing on sites that show up in search results
Analysts say that these lawsuits are forcing European courts to decide between the importance of individuals’ right to privacy online and the broader benefits of freedom of speech.
“If you force companies to become gatekeepers over everything that happens on their networks, you are destroying the essence of the Internet and its value for freedom of communication,” said Joe McNamee, director of the Brussels-based privacy campaign group European Digital Rights1
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