People in Europe can get Google to delete search results about them if they prove the information is “manifestly inaccurate,” the EU’s top court ruled Thursday, according to Politico.
The case kicked off when two investment managers requested Google to dereference results of a search made on the basis of their names, which provided links to certain articles criticizing that group’s investment model. They say those articles contain inaccurate claims.
Google refused to comply, arguing that it was unaware whether the information contained in the articles was accurate or not.
But in a ruling Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union opened the door to the investment managers being able to successfully trigger the so-called „right to be forgotten” under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
“Te right to freedom of expression and information cannot be taken into account where, at the very least, a part – which is not of minor importance – of the information found in the referenced content proves to be inaccurate,” the court said in a press release accompanying the ruling.
People who want to scrub inaccurate results from search engines have to provide sufficient proof that what is said about them is false. But it doesn’t have to come from a court case against a publisher, for instance. They have “to provide only evidence that can reasonably be required of [them] to try to find,” the court said.
“We welcome the decision, and we will now study the text of the CJEU’s decision,” a spokesperson for Google said in a statement to Politico. “The links and thumbnails in question are not available via the web search and image search anymore; the content at issue has been offline for a long time.”