Among the so-called digital rights guaranteed by the new Spanish Data Protection Law which is the Data Protection and Digital Rights Guarantee Act 3/2018 of December 5, is the right to digital erasure on Internet searches.
It is the right of citizens to request a company which manages Internet search engines to remove personal information from the list of search results provided by a search engine and obtained by name.
Nonetheless, a search removal request by a citizen does not provide unlimited rights to remove personal information from the Web. In order that the information to be removed it must be inadequate, inaccurate, irrelevant, outdated or excessive. However, this law also provides for the exercise of such rights when the personal circumstances invoked demonstrate that the right to privacy takes precedence over the right to information.
This right can be exercised via the manager of the search engine and the Spanish Agency for Data Protection. It should be noted that the most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have systems that enable a citizen to request the removal of indexing data by name.
It must be emphasized that this law does not require the removal of the original source of information. Therefore, personal information will not disappear from the Internet, but it will disappear from search engines by name. This means your data will remain online but will not turn up in search results.
The Supreme Court in its recent judgment of January 11, 2019, number 12 /2019, has dismissed an appeal filed by Google which endeavoured to make the right to information take precedence over the right to be forgotten.
The Supreme Court did not agree with Google in spite of the tech giant's persuasive defence arguments and declared that the protection of the right to digital erasure must be guaranteed in those cases in which the information that is circulated and located by Internet search engines contain substantially inaccurate data that "implies a devaluation of reputation and image that is revealed to be unjustified by contradicting the rulings formulated in a final judicial decision".
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