EU citizens will have the ability to take back their online presence, thanks to a new ruling requiring Google to delete inaccurate results.
According to Politico, the ruling came about in a case involving two investment managers that wanted Google to delete search results linking to articles about them, articles they said contained inaccurate claims. Google refused, saying it had no knowledge of the accuracy of the claims.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled in favor of the investment managers, allowing them to trigger the EU’s GDPR “right to be forgotten” clause.
“The right to freedom of expression and information cannot be taken into account where, at the very least, a part – which is not of minor importance – of the information found in the referenced content proves to be inaccurate,” the court said in a press release.
The court ruled that citizens would need “to provide only evidence that can reasonably be required of [them] to try to find,” to prove that search results contain inaccurate claims about them.
“We welcome the decision, and we will now study the text of the CJEU’s decision,” a spokesperson for Google told Politico. “The links and thumbnails in question are not available via the web search and image search anymore; the content at issue has been offline for a long time.”