Guy Who Won Original Right To Be Forgotten Case Loses His Attempt To Have New Story About His Past Forgotten

from the inception dept

The whole right to be forgotten thing over in Europe continues to get more and more bizarre. Not too long ago, we wrote about one Thomas Goolnik, who had succeeded in getting an old NY Times story about him "delinked" from his name in Europe. The NY Times then wrote about that delinking, and we wrote about the NY Times article. Mr. Goolnik then succeeded in having our article about his successful right to be forgotten attempt also forgotten by Google. So we wrote about that too. And, once again, Goolnik succeeded in having that story forgotten. As of yet, it appears our final story on Goolnik has remained accessible on European searches for Goolnik's name, but we have no idea if it's because Google has realized that it should remain up or if Goolnik just hasn't made a request.

Meanwhile, it appears that the guy who first convinced the European Court of Justice to enforce this right to be forgotten, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, may have run into a similar situation. As you probably remember, Costeja brought the original case that argued that Google should no longer show results on searches for his name that linked to some stories in the late 90s about his being forced to sell some land to cover debts. The Court eventually decided that since this information was no longer "relevant," that under the data protection directive, it should be "delinked" in Google's database as a "privacy" measure.

Of course, as many people pointed out, in bringing that very case, the details of Costeja's financial transactions suddenly became relevant again. And, apparently that resulted in more people commenting on Costeja, including an article entitled "The unforgettable story of the seizure to the defaulter Mario Costeja Gonzalez that happened in 1998." And, as you might imagine, he wasn't too happy about some of the comments, and with this newfound power that he helped create in hand, he demanded that Google also take down links to such comments (most likely including that article linked in this paragraph).

And here's where it gets fun: Google refused. And so Costeja went to the Spanish Data Protection Authority to complain... and the Spanish DPA rejected his claim, noting that this information is now relevant in part because Costeja himself made it relevant again.

Now the DPA finds that there is indeed a preponderant interest of the public in the comments about the famous case that gave rise to the CJEU judgment of May 13, 2014 – and expressly reminds that the claimant itself went public about the details.

So, yes, the right to be forgotten has now made the story that was "successfully" forgotten originally so newsworthy that it may no longer be forgotten, and in fact is much more widely known. I think we've heard of some term for that before...

Filed Under: data protection, eu, free speech, mario costeja, mario costeja gonzalez, newsworthy, right to be forgotten, spain
Companies: google