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The Right to Erasure: an (edited?) history

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22 July 2020
Issue: 7896 / Categories: Features , Privacy , Human rights
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The evolution of the right to erasure & how it is now being used in practice, by Alex Keenlyside & Hannah Crowther
  • 2014: the CJEU establishes a ‘right to be forgotten’.
  • 2018: the GDPR introduces a ‘right to erasure’.

It’s been over six years since the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) first established a ‘right to be forgotten’ in 2014, in the fight by Mr Costeja to have links to news articles about his bankruptcy de-listed from Google Search results (Google Spain SL and another company v Agencia Espanola de proteccion de Datos (AEPD) and another, [2014] All ER (D) 124 (May)). Then, in 2018, the GDPR introduced the far more expansive (if rather less poetic) ‘right to erasure’, exercisable against any controller. In this article, we consider the evolution of the right in the UK, and how it is now being used in practice.

In Costeja, the CJEU decided that news articles and other content, even if lawfully published online, should

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