Lawyers predict increasing numbers of people will ask to be ‘forgotten’, following a High Court ruling on two people’s request to be delisted from Google’s search engine.
Two anonymous individuals claimed Google was in breach of its obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 and had committed the tort of misuse of private information. In NT1 and NT2 v Google [2018] EWHC 799 (QB), Mr Justice Warby held that Google was not obliged to delist search results relating to the spent conviction of the first claimant, NT1, but that it was obliged to do so for the second, NT2.
The ‘right to be forgotten’—removed from search engine links—stems from a European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgment in 2014, Google Spain SL v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos (Case C-131/12).
Jon Baines, a data protection advisor at Mishcon de Reya, said the ruling suggests the courts will judge ‘right to be forgotten’ cases on their specific facts and that there is likely to be ‘an increase in the number of successful requests for delisting, as individuals take note of the court's analysis, and assert their strong and potentially enforceable rights to have out-of-date or inaccurate information about them on the internet made more difficult, at least, to find’.
Google has revealed it has received more than 650,000 requests to remove approximately 2.43 million URLs from its index since 2014 and has complied with 43% of them.
Baines said: ‘Although the forthcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) codifies a qualified “right to erasure”, it is often overlooked that the same right exists under the current law, at least since the judgment of the European Court of Justice in the 2014 "Google Spain" case.
‘Despite this, there has been relatively little litigation thus far, and the NT1 and NT2 cases were the first going to full trial to be ruled on in the High Court. Mr Justice Warby—after first holding that Google could not rely on the very broad “journalism exemption” in the Data Protection Act 1998—followed the ECJ's approach in Google Spain, balancing the fundamental rights to protection of personal data with the rights of freedom of expression and freedom of information.
‘On the facts, this led to the two different outcomes.’
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