European Court ruling in favour of the data subject over search engines

In 2014, the right to be forgotten was first officially recognised as a human right by the European Court of Justice. This was due to the ruling made in the case of Google Spain v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeka Gonzalez.

The decision was that the search engine operator (in this case, Google) must consider legal claims from people to remove their data from Google search results according to certain circumstances.

These are:

1. That the search results are inadequate.
2. That the search results are irrelevant or no longer relevant.
3. That the search results are excessive given the length of time since publication.

The seeds of the current General Data Protection Regulation can be found in the EU’s implementation of the Data Protection Directive in 1995. This directive was brought in to provide regulation for the processing of personal data. Today, this is part of human rights law.