Cengage Advantage Books: Business Law Today, The Essentials 11th Edition by Roger LeRoy Miller

Exercise 1

As the saying goes, the Internet never forgets. If fifteen years ago you had some financial problems and had to sell your house at auction, that information about you remains available forever. A Spanish lawyer, Mario Costeja Gonzàlez, found himself in just that situation. If anyone Googled his name, they discovered that his house had gone into foreclosure when he was a younger man.
Taking Google to Court
Costeja Gonzàlez requested that Google's search engine no longer access those old court records. Google refused. The case ultimately ended up in the European Union Court of Justice. Google lost. The company had to remove the links to publicly available information that Costeja Gonzàlez considered damaging and an invasion of his privacy.
What "The Right to Be Forgotten" Means
The new "right to be forgotten" in the European Union allows individuals to petition Google to remove search result links that are personal in nature and that have become "outdated" or "irrelevant." Does that mean that anyone in Europe can ask that links to old information be removed Not really. Right now, a European wishing to remove a link to older personal data needs a lawyer to make the request. Moreover, the original "offensive" documents are not removed-only the Google search link to those documents. According to Viviane Reading, vice-president of the European Commission, "It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right of the total erasure of history."
Can the Ruling Be Applied Outside Europe
As it stands, the Court of Justice's ruling applies only within the twenty-eight countries of the European Union. Nonetheless, in 2015, the head of the French Data Protection Authority, Isabel Falque-Pierrotin, began campaigning to expand the ruling. She argued that if an individual has the right to be delisted from search results, such delisting should happen worldwide.
In 2015, an advisory group sponsored by Google issued a report recommending that the right to be forgotten be limited just to the European Union. According to that report, the same legal framework used in Europe would not work in the U.S. because of the First Amendment.
How could the "right to be forgotten" affect free speech