A European high court ruled on Tuesday that Internet companies including Google, Inc. need to remove personal and sensitive information from their servers that have been deemed outdated, irrelevant or excessive.
The decision came after Mario Costeja Gonzalez of Spain filed a complaint against Google, saying that searches on his name resulted to finding links leading to a newspaper article from 1998 that concerned the repossession of his home, Daily Mail reported.
According to Reuters, Gonzales' case is just one of the 220 complaints received by the Spanish data protection agency against Google; all were requesting to delete sensitive materials related to them.
The case, filed at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), emphasized the cyberspace dilemma between supporters of free speech and those who valued privacy. The latter believed that a person has the "right to be forgotten," by having his or her digital marks deleted from the Internet.
"We are very satisfied that there is an end now to the ferocious resistance shown by the search engine to comply with the resolutions of the Spanish data protection agency in this matter," the Spanish agency's spokeswoman told Reuters.
In 2012, the European Commission proposed the same right on the Internet. This was supported by the European Parliament a year after favoring the "right of erasure" of specific information.
Privacy issues and individual data protection became a sensitive issue in Europe after former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, leaked information about the US' secret surveillance program. According to Snowden, the US monitored a massive amount of emails and phone information worldwide.
A state "eraser" law that requires Internet companies to remove material posted by a minor recently passed in California, and is scheduled to go into effect in 2015.
Google released a statement to The Verge, saying "this is a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general."
