On May 13, privacy trumped free expression, as the giant American-based search engine, Google Inc., lost before the Court of Justice, the European Union’s highest court, marking another milestone in the epic struggle in the 21st century between these rights. The decision also epitomizes the widening schism between American and European approaches to privacy where “free speech” considerations are involved.
A man brought proceedings in a Spanish court against Google to withdraw personal data not from the Internet but from the index utilized by Google, so that his data would not show up in search results. His case was based on the Spanish law that implemented EU Directive 95/46 relating to privacy rights of individuals regarding personal data. He complained that when someone searched on the Internet through Google for his name, they retrieved two links to a newspaper that had 12-year-old information about an auction for his property in connection with debt collection proceedings against him, which were now resolved and, in his view, irrelevant. He demanded the newspaper remove or alter the pages to prevent them from being available to search engines, and demanded Google or its Spanish subsidiary prevent the information from being included in search results.
