Case 8 Google and the Right to Be Forgotten1

Case 8 Google and the Right to
Be Forgotten1
Cynthia E. Clark
Bentley University
In 2009, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, a self-employed attorney living in a small town outside
Madrid, Spain, casually “googled” himself and was startled by what came up on his computer
screen. Prominently displayed in the search results was a brief legal notice that had appeared
more than a decade earlier in a local newspaper, La Vanguardia, which listed property seized
and being auctioned by a government agency for nonpayments of debts. Among the properties
was a home jointly owned by Costeja and his wife.
Costeja immediately realized that this information could damage his reputation as an attorney.
Equally troubling, the information was no longer factual. He had paid his debt nearly a decade
earlier. Abanlex, Costeja’s small law firm, depended on the Internet to gain much of its new
business, which was often generated by a Google search. Potential clients might choose not to
hire him based on the old auction notice, he reflected. His mind then turned to the possible
effects of this kind of information on other people’s livelihoods. “There are people who cannot
get a job because of content that is irrelevant,” he thought.2 “I support freedom of expression and
I do not defend censorship. [However, I decided] to fight for the right to request the deletion of
data that violates the honor, dignity and reputation of individuals.”3
The next week, Costeja wrote to La Vanguardia and requested that it remove the article about
his debt notice, because it had had been fully resolved a number of years earlier and reference to
it now was, therefore, entirely irrelevant.4 In doing so, he was making use of his rights under
Spain’s strong data protection policies, which recognized the protection and integrity of personal
data as a constitutional right under Section 18 of the nation’s Data Protection Act.5 In response,
the newspaper informed him that it had recently uploaded to the Internet all its past archives,
dating back to 1881, to allow them to be searched by the public. It also noted that the auction
notice had originally been publicly posted in order to secure as many bidders as possible. The
newspaper refused Costeja’s request, stating that the information was obtained from public
records and had thus been published lawfully.6
To be sure, the real problem for Costeja was not that the notice had appeared
in La Vanguardia’s digital library, but that it had shown up in the results of the most widely
used search engine in the world, Google, where potential clients might use it to judge his
character.7 Following this reasoning, Costeja then wrote to Google Spain, the firm’s Spanish
affiliate, only to be told that the parent company, Google Inc., was the entity responsible for the
development of search results.8 Costeja was taken aback by this development. “The resources
Google has at their disposal aren’t like those of any other citizens,” he reflected.9 Costeja felt he
would be at a disadvantage in a lawsuit against an industry giant like Google.
In March 2010, after his unsuccessful attempts with the newspaper and Google Spain, Costeja
turned to Spain’s Data Protection Agency (SDPA), the government agency responsible for
enforcing the Data Protection Act. “Google in Spain asked me to address myself to its
headquarters in the U.S., but I found it too far and difficult to launch a complaint in the U.S., so I
went to the agency in Spain to ask for their assistance. They said I was right, and the case went to
court,” he explained.10 In a legal filing, Costeja requested, first, that the agency issue an

administrative order requiring La Vanguardia either to remove or alter the pages in question (so
that his personal data no longer appeared) or to use certain tools made available by search
engines in order to shield the data from view. Second, he requested that the agency require that
Google Spain or Google Inc. remove or conceal his personal data so that it no longer appeared in
the search results and in the links to La Vanguardia. Costeja stated that his debt had been fully
resolved.11
With these steps, a small-town Spanish lawyer had drawn one of the world’s richest and best-
known companies, Google, into a debate over the right to be forgotten.
Google, Inc.
Google Inc. is a technology company that builds products and provides services to organize
information. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Mountain View, CA, Google’s mission was
to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It employed
more than 55,000 people and had revenues of $45 billion. The company also had 70 offices in
more than 40 countries.
The company’s main product, Google Search, provided information online in response to a
user’s search. Google’s other well-known products provided additional services. For
example, Google Now provided information to users when they needed it, and its Product
Listing Ads offered product image, price, and merchant information. The company also
provided AdWords, an auction-based advertising program and AdSense, which enabled
websites that were part of the Google network to deliver ads. Google Display was a display
advertising network; DoubleClick Ad Exchange was a marketplace for the trading of display
ad space; and YouTube offered video, interactive, and other ad formats.
Search Technology
In its core business, Google conducted searches in three stages: crawling and indexing, applying
algorithms, and fighting spam.
Crawlers, programs that browsed the web to create an index of data, looked at web pages and
followed links on those pages. They then moved from link to link and brought data about those
web pages back to Google’s servers. Google would then use this information to create an index
of how exactly to retrieve information for its users. Algorithms were the computer processes and
formulas that took users’ questions and turned them into answers. At the most basic level,
Google’s algorithms looked up the user’s search terms in the index to find the most appropriate
pages. For a typical query, thousands, if not millions, of web pages might have helpful
information. Google’s algorithms relied on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that made it
possible to guess what an individual was really looking for. These signals included the terms on
websites, the freshness of content, the region, and the page rank of the web page.12 Lastly, the
company fought spam through a combination of computer algorithms and manual review. Spam
sites attempted to game their way to the top of search results by repeating keywords, buying
links that passed Google’s PageRank process, or putting invisible text on the screen. Google
scouted out and removed spam because it could make legitimate websites harder to find.