Google v.

Spain

The Right to Be Forgotten

In Google v. Spain, the European Court of Justice ruled that the European citizens have a right to
request that commercial search firms, such as Google, that gather personal information for profit
should remove links to private information when asked, provided the information is no longer
relevant. The Court did not say newspapers should remove articles. The Court found that the
fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in
some circumstances, the public interest in access to Information. 

FACTS: In 2010 Mario Costeja Gonzá lez, filed a complaint with the Agencia Españ ola de Protecció n
de Datos (AEDP), the Spanish Data Protection Agency, against a local newspaper and Google Spain
for claims relating to auction notices mentioning Gonzá lez published in 1998. The notices
concerned real estate auctions held to secure repayment of Gonzá lez's social security debts.
Gonzá lez contended that these pages were no longer necessary because "the attachment
proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years and that reference to
them was now entirely irrelevant." He sought to have the local newspaper, La Vanguardia, remove
the pages or alter them so his personal information was no longer displayed. He also sought for
Google Inc. to remove the links to the articles in question so that the information no longer
appeared in Google Search results.

ISSUE:  Whether an individual has the right to request that their personal data be removed from
search results (i.e. the "right to be forgotten").

RULING: YES. The ECJ held that individuals have a right to request search engines to remove links
to personal information. 
    
The Court held that it is not necessary, in order to find a right of the data subject that the
information relating to him personally should no longer be linked to his name by a list of results,
that the inclusion of the information in question in the list of results causes prejudice to him.

As the data subject may, in the light of his fundamental rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter
of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, request that the information in question no longer
be made available to the general public by its inclusion in such a list of results, those rights
override, as a rule, not only the economic interest of the operator of the search engine but also the
interest of the general public in finding that information upon a search relating to the data subject’s
name, The public's interest in the information. The public's interest, in turn, may vary depending on
whether the individual is a public figure. According to the Court, Google's economic interest and the
public's interest in links to Gonzalez's auction notices did not outweigh the serious interference
with Gonzalez's fundamental rights under the Directive.