Google Spain v. González: Did the Court Forget about Freedom of Expression?

Abstract

When reviewing a job application letter, going on a first date, or considering doing business with someone, the first thing many people do is entering the person's name in a search engine. A search engine can point searchers to information that would otherwise have remained obscure. If somebody searched for the name of Spanish lawyer Mario Costeja González, Google showed search results that included a link to a 1998 newspaper announcement implying he had financial troubles at the time. González wanted Google to stop showing those links and started a procedure in Spain. After some legal wrangling, the Spanish Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for advice on the application of the Data Protection Directive, which led to the controversial judgment in Google Spain. In its judgment, the CJEU holds that people, under certain conditions, have the right to have search results for their name delisted. This right can also extend to lawfully published information.

Google Spain, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (2014)

“…61 The Court was rightly criticised for failing to acknowledge that data protection in this area clearly impacts on the enjoyment of a fundamental right, namely freedom of expression, including more specifi cally the right to receive and impart information. 62 However, similar claims that the presumptive weighting established in favour of data protection confl icted with the theoretically equal value of (qualifi ed) rights such as data protection and freedom of expression 63 were less well judged. Rather than being asserted as an a priori axiom, this presumption was grounded in a specifi c analysis of the potential for name-based search engine indexing, the activity being particularly considered, to potentially seriously interfere with an individual ' s data subject rights.…”

Legal framework, limits and standards for the application of the right to be forgotten: The experience of the European Union

“…Левеск отмечает, что право быть забытым «лечит только симптомы, а не причины» и означает, что информация не удаляется, а исключается (скрывается) из списка поиска результатов и может быть доступна с других доменов (Levesque 2016). Некоторые исследователи критически оценивают сбалансированность решения Суда ЕС по делу Google Spain, отмечая, что это решение «забыло» о свободе выражения мнения (Kulk, Zuiderveen Borgesius 2014). С. Пирс указывает, что, сосредоточившись на праве на уважение частной жизни, ЕС «забыл, что другие права и гарантии были также применимы», включая право на доступ к информации (Peers 2014).…”

The Limits of Memory and the News: Archival Journalism, Law, Ethics, and the Right to be Forgotten

“…The fact that the right to be forgotten presents clear challenges for freedom of expression around the world has not deterred other countries from adopting it (Youm & Park, 2016). For example, within the EU, the right has been recognized by the courts of the Netherlands, offering a more nuanced definition than Costeja, characterizing it not only as a right to protect individuals against unfavorable information from the past, but as a right to avoid that any information that may, in the present, be considered excessive, irrelevant, or unnecessarily defamatory haunts a person for the rest of their lives (Kulk & Borgesius, 2014;Kulk & Borgesius, 2015). In Google v. CNIL (2019), the CJEU has also determined that while EU law does not compel a search engine like Google to disable access to search results about a person worldwide, there is also nothing in EU law that would prohibit the courts of any of its individual Member states to issue an order that requires information to be disabled or removed globally (See Gstrein, 2020;Zalnieriute, 2020).…”