But behind the lustre lies a much more difficult situation. The EU court's ruling relates to a long-running dispute around a 1998 newspaper article relating to the repossession of a Spanish man's home. The court ruled that the newspaper had acted in the public interest in reporting the news, but that
Google's offering a link to the article in search results represented an infringement of his privacy – and so the search giant should delete the result.
The court didn't establish an absolute right to vanish: "a fair balance" should be sought between the public's right to access given information and the "data subject's" right to privacy and data protection.
This creates a real quagmire for any company offering up information online: after how long does a bankruptcy ruling become something that should be private? Is that different if the subject is a celebrity or a politician? What if they offered the information voluntarily (or sold their story) in the first place? How about drug use, or prostitution, or murder? What if a person stands for public office a few years after having their search records scrubbed?
If nothing else, deciding such issues on a case-by-case basis will require huge teams of compliance staff in every tech company (and probably most media companies), and will tie up courts on the limits of each provision for years to come.
