EU: No right to be forgotten in data privacy laws

Data privacy law in the European Union does not give citizens the "right to be forgotten," an EU court has ruled. The opinion handed down Tuesday by Niilo Jaaskinen, the advocate general of the Luxembourg-based European Court of Justice, said there are no legal provisions requiring Internet service providers to delete personal information just because it was embarrassing. The court was considering the case of a real-estate auction story published in a Spanish newspaper in 1998 that mentioned debts of the property's owner, who wanted Google to eliminate all links to the auction story. Jaaskinen said Google's role in the case was aggregating the data and was not a "controller of information" so had no requirement to delete the data. The current EU data protection scheme "does not entitle a person to restrict or terminate dissemination of personal data that he considers to be harmful or contrary to his interests," he said. The "right to be forgotten" only applied in cases where information was incomplete or inaccurate, he said. Google said it welcomed the decision. "This is a good opinion for free expression," Google spokesman William Echikson said. "We're glad to see it supports our long-held view that requiring search engines to suppress legitimate and legal information would amount to censorship."