Right to Be Forgotten Law

Given the great growth of the Internet, the European Union in 2006 created the law on Data Protection on the Internet called «Right to be forgotten.» The EU’s decision on search engines like Google is that they must remove links to information published in the past if it is proven that they harm a citizen.

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Google should allow users to choose if some of their information should be removed from the search results. This is known as «the right to be forgotten.» Therefore, Google is planning to delete links to sensitive information in search results. Thus, the company will be showing a warning indicating that there is related information but that it has been eliminated by request of the users within the European Union.

The judgment of the European Supreme Court stipulates that the residents of the European Union could ask Google not to show certain links in search results; this would only be effective if it is verified that the links are harmful for those who ask for the omission in the search results.

These notices will work in a similar way to those found in search results that include protected or deleted content due to copyright issues. A notice at the bottom of the page will indicate that some links were deleted or blocked by user request. Although the links will not be displayed in Google’s search results, the information on the source site will not be removed.

Deleting searches for anything on Google or search engines is very difficult even when websites that store this data have already been deleted. All search engines save the results in their cache to streamline searches to users, which means that you can still access the website’s data.

Each person has to be aware of the private information that goes up to the network because it can have consequences because once it has been placed on the Internet, it can be difficult to eliminate them. We must bear in mind that these data may be used against us in the future and that potential employers may search your name on the Internet to obtain illegal information about you.