The right to be forgotten.
The right to be forgotten stems from the Cotija judgment of 2014. That issue revolves around the following. Mr. Cotija went bankrupt in the 1990s. If someone searches for his name in Google, a number of results are shown with information about that bankruptcy. Mr. Cotija does not wish to be endlessly reminded of this and asks Google not to display these results anymore. On 13 May 2014, the Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest EU court, decided that search engines in principle are required to block certain results when searching for a person’s name. The search engine may only refuse such a forget-me request if there are compelling reasons to display the corresponding results. Today, the right to be forgotten is part of Articles 17 and 21 GDPR.
The right to forget does not lead to the relevant data being removed from the internet. However, the URLs are no longer displayed in the search results when searching for a name. That means the information can still be found by typing in the URL, or by using another search query. For example, the article “John is a thief”, will no longer be found with the term “John”, but if you search for “thief”. The right to be forgotten therefore eliminates 99% of the negative effects of information on the Internet. Most people use a name when they search for information about a person. By blocking the relevant information in such a search, the information can only be found by highly motivated searchers. At the same time, the information remains on the internet,
The right to be forgotten is therefore a very specific instrument. The advantage of this is that a right to forget request must in principle be granted. Information that is lawfully on a website can also be successfully “forgotten”. Therefore, in some cases it is easier than asking the website owner himself to remove the information. That is why tens of thousands of people make use of the right to forget every year Google diritto all’oblio dall’italia.
ECtHR Bacardi v. Italy: Also right to forget against (news) websites.
Normally, a website owner is asked to remove unlawful information. Such a request is subject to very heavy scrutiny because removal is a serious violation of freedom of expression. The information is then no longer accessible. In Bacardi v. Italy , the ECtHR recognizes that (news) websites can also be forced to delist certain articles ,
Delisting or de- indexing means that the (news) website takes steps to prevent search engines from indexing the particular page. This can be done, for example, by including a noindex tag in the meta tags, or by submitting a request to the search engine . By delisting an article, the information will only be found by people who are actually interested in the subject and are motivated to obtain that information. At the same time, the information is also not permanently removed from the internet, so that delisting is a much less serious infringement of the freedom of expression.
The ECtHR does not mention any specific criteria for assessing a delisting request for a (news) website. It is obvious to align with the criteria that apply to a request to be forgotten by a search engine. After all, delisting actually achieves the same result. This also means that a delisting request will be granted much faster than a removal request. Freedom of expression is in fact much less restricted.
