I can't find our privacy law thread, so I'm starting a new one.
The UK high court has just handed down a pretty major ruling on the "right to be forgotten", ie delisted from search engines. It's intriguingly, if frustratingly, nuanced.
On the one hand:
On the other:
No compensation even for NT2 though.
The UK high court has just handed down a pretty major ruling on the "right to be forgotten", ie delisted from search engines. It's intriguingly, if frustratingly, nuanced.
On the one hand:
Around the turn of the century, NT1 was a public figure with a limited role in public life. His role has changed such that he now plays only a limited role in public life, as a businessman not dealing with consumers. That said, he still plays such a role. The crime and punishment information is not information of a private nature. It was information about business crime, its prosecution, and its punishment. It was and is essentially public in its character. NT1 did not enjoy any reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of the information at the time of his prosecution, conviction and sentence. My conclusion is that he is not entitled to have it delisted now.
The crime and punishment information has become out of date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users of Google Search to justify its continued availability, so that an appropriate delisting order should be made. The conviction was always going to become spent, and it did so in March 2014, though it would have done so in July of that year anyway. NT2 has frankly acknowledged his guilt, and expressed genuine remorse. There is no evidence of any risk of repetition. His current business activities are in a field quite different from that in which he was operating at the time. His past offending is of little if any relevance to anybody’s assessment of his suitability to engage in relevant business activity now, or in the future. There is no real need for anybody to be warned about that activity.
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