Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2011, reporting on hearings at Spain’s Audiencia Nacional. The case was later referred to the EU Court of Justice, whose May 2014 ruling recognised a right to have search results delisted, settling the article’s open question; the GDPR later codified the right to erasure.
Google is facing legal action brought by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD), which is asking Google to remove the most sensitive personal data about private individuals.
Google’s defence is that it is merely an intermediary that indexes the content published on websites, including Spain’s Official State Gazette (BOE). The removal or de-indexing of data can be done, it says, but it is a very costly task for the search engine, given that every day it indexes, on a massive scale, everything its “spider” collects from the web.
At the trial, the State invoked the so-called “right to be forgotten“, which holds that, just as an offence expires after a certain time, the person affected should have the right to have their record disappear from the search engine.
Google, for its part, argued that if any user could delete everything they don’t like about themselves, the internet would stop being the source of information it is today and would turn into a “family album” of whatever memories suit a person or a company.
According to Google, deleting information from the web on request is called “censorship”.
As the hearing heated up, Google pointed to the legal loophole that, in its view, protects it from being tried for this in Spain: the company is actually headquartered in California and governed by that state’s rules, so it claims to be exempt from some European laws. In its words: “Although we are present in Spain, we have no subsidiaries and a single headquarters, located in California, and we strive to comply with the laws that apply there.”
One of the “aggrieved parties” is a doctor who was charged with an offence in 1991. An online newspaper published the story and the search engine indexed it. Now, whenever someone types in this doctor’s name, the incident comes up, and he wants it deleted.
Google maintains that responsibility for removing that content lies with the website that published it, and it can’t quite see why it should be the one keeping watch and censoring news stories according to the wishes of private users, since that would undermine the objectivity of the internet.
This trial is a first in Spain. Depending on the final ruling, the internet may carry on being what it is today (a source of information), or things may change and, as further lawsuits follow, it could end up as a collection of self-serving news and deleted data, whenever someone doesn’t like what is said about them or their company.
In short: Google doesn’t want to censor, and private users want to control the information about them and delete whatever doesn’t suit them. Let the debate begin.
Further reading
Featured image: Zarateman, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
