European court says Google must respect ‘right to be forgotten’

The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), which is the highest court in Europe, ruled that an individual’s right to privacy requires that the world’s largest search engine, Google, delete private information that is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed”.

In other words; the European courts recognized that at a certain point, pieces of information from an individual’s past that will circulate in cyberspace forever and serve no purpose other than to embarrass or humiliate a person should be removed so that people have an opportunity to move past events in their history.

Although this decision has no bearing on Court’s here in the United States, the ECJ’s decision reflects the sentiment of the European Court that people can change and should not be forced to live forever in the shadow of their past. Hopefully the US will follow.

The full text of the article can be found here.