The so-called right to be forgotten is a legal principle that allows European citizens to request the removal of obsolete, irrelevant or no longer relevant personal information from search engines. Sanctioned by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014, the provisions on the right to be forgotten start from the assumption that every subject should have control of the personal information concerning his or her life.
When is it possible to exercise the right to be forgotten in Europe
Individuals have the right to request the removal of links to web pages that contain personal information about them, if that information is outdated, inaccurate, or no longer relevant. In some cases, however, thepublic interest in keeping that same information easily accessible through search engine results.
The procedure requires the interested person to present a request to the search engine specifying the reasons why it believes the links should be removed. The search engine managers are asked to examine the request made taking into account the rights of the individual and the public interest.
It’s a bit of a mode of operation unusual because the search engine (for example Google Search) acts as a bit of a judge by establishing, from time to time, which requests to reject and which ones it is appropriate to follow up on. Furthermore, paradoxically, the content may not only be published on websites (including newspapers) but also stay in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for non-EU countries.
In the event that the interested party is not satisfied with the “treatment” received in the event of rejection of the request, he can always turn to ordinary justice. In another article we provided some advice on how to delete news from Google. The Privacy Guarantor it also established that the request of the person entitled must be accepted even if he is not identifiable through his personal details but also through other “clues”, for example the position held. In short, the right to be forgotten also applies when we are not just talking about names and surnames.
Google’s new position: It will no longer inform website operators
Adapting to the requirements of the judges of a Swedish court, who saw Google confronting a citizen who had previously tried to assert his reasons, the company led by Sundar Pichai will no longer inform website operators by providing the URL removal details.
In its decision of December 2023, in fact, the Swedish court established that informing webmasters about the removal from the SERPs of one or more links to their sites, on the basis of a dispute linked to the exercise of the right to be forgotten, constituted a violation of privacy of the person who submitted the request.
Thus, in response to the Swedish position (which at this point has full value within the entire territory of the European Union), Google declared that it had aligned itself, despite having expressed its dissent on the merits.
Over the course of 5 years, since the right to be forgotten actually came into force, Google has received almost a million requests to remove links. Although it rejected more than half of them, the Mountain View company still removed almost 1.5 million individual URLs from its indexes, at least for the Member States of the Union.
It must be said that even today, a few clicks are enough to consult the “foreign” versions (outside the borders of the European Union) to access the “unfiltered” SERPs. On the other hand, Vint Cerf himself, one of the fathers of the Internet, already in 2012 believed that the right to be forgotten was something unachievable. He said that if someone publishes a book, it cannot be easily withdrawn: you will always find some copies in bookstores all over the world.