Google v. CNIL and the Right to Be Forgotten: A Judgment of Solomon

Abstract

The EUCJ ruling on Case C-507/17 provides further clarity on the territorial scope of the right to be forgotten. The court interprets that the EU law does not require a search engine operator to attend the right to de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine globally, but only on those corresponding to all the Member States, but at the same time it also clarifies that a supervisory or judicial authority of a Member State remains competent to, after weighing up the legally protected interests, order (where appropriate) that the de-referencing is carried out on all versions of the relevant search engine. A decision that likely does not please either the search engines or the data subjects, and which drops a certain dose of uncertainty on the system. GDPR, right to be forgotten, right to de-referencing, search engines, territorial scope