The EU’s right to be forgotten is migrating to other countries

In 2010, Mario Costeja González, a Spanish citizen, filed a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Authority against Google and La Vanguardia Ediciones, a Spanish newspaper. González said that a Google search for his name returned classified ads showing that his house was being auctioned off in order to repay his family’s debts. González said that these ads were more than a decade out of date and argued that their appearance in a Google search violated his right to privacy. A lower court ruled in his favor; the matter was then referred to the European Union’s Court of Justice, or ECJ, which, in 2014, also sided with González. The ECJ decided that a right to be forgotten—also known as the “right of erasure”—was implied by the Data Protection Directive, a 1995 EU rule, and that this gave EU citizens a right to the rectification, erasure, or blocking of their personal data, as well as a right to object to the processing of their personal data by corporations for a number of reasons.

In 2018, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation took effect, superseding the Data Protection Directive. Article 17 of the GDPR outlines how and when the right to be forgotten should be applied, stating that people may request the removal of their personal information when the information is no longer relevant to the purpose for which it was collected, when the individual withdraws their consent to the information’s publication, and when there is no overriding legitimate interest to process the information, among other circumstances.

News organizations such as the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Postmedia, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation filed statements arguing that Google plays an important role in distributing news, but the court ruled that these were not relevant to the case. The decision did not exactly create a right to be forgotten in Canada. The country’s privacy law does not offer a clear-cut right to have content removed, but individuals can appeal to the principles of accuracy and appropriateness, which are protected by the law.

one criticism of the GDPR in general, and the right to be forgotten in particular, has been that removing content from the web conflicts with freedom of speech. This argument has particular resonance not only in the US, with its First Amendment, but also in Canada, where the federal Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the right to freedom of speech.

And Canada isn’t the only non-European country that is looking at either implementing or enforcing a right to be forgotten. Australia is also said to be working on privacy legislation that could include a similar right; in January, The Guardian reported that Mark Dreyfus, the attorney-general, indicated that the right to be forgotten “will be considered for the next tranche of Australian legislation.”

The GDPR, of course, doesn’t apply to the US, and the First Amendment would seem to be a significant hurdle to introducing a legal right to be forgotten. But some US news organizations have started offering a version of this right of their own accord, particularly in the realm of criminal justice. This year, the Chicago Sun-Times introduced a right to be forgotten policy, saying that it isn’t fair “for stories about arrests to follow people around forever if they were never convicted—or if charges were dropped, dismissed, reversed or expunged”; leaving such stories online, the paper said, could lead to lasting negative impacts for their subjects, such as “unsteady employment, a lack of housing access or other issues.”

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