The Supreme Court recognized the right to be able to remove localized content from an Internet search engine by putting the two surnames of a person and not only with the full name as was previously established.
The Administrative-Containment Chamber has issued a ruling that decrees that the exercise of the right to be forgotten allows any affected person to demand that a search engine (such as Google) remove any information found from the name from its results lists complete or only including both surnames.
The Supreme Court establishes as regulations the exercise of the right of opposition, rectification or cancellation of data processing, and, where appropriate, the right to be forgotten, recognized in article 6.4 of the Organic Law on Protection of Personal Data, which empowers the interested person to demand that the manager of a search engine eliminate all the results obtained from the full name or the two surnames, such as links to web pages, legally published to third parties, that contain truthful data and information, related to person.
The Chamber studied the case raised by a person who asked Microsoft Corporation, manager of the Bing search engine, to de-index the URLs for searches made not only by his full name, but also by his last name. Microsoft agreed to the first request but rejected the second on the basis that the two surnames are not an irrefutable identifier of a person.
Likewise, the AEPD and the National Court did not agree to said claim in relation to the two surnames, considering that, according to the Civil Registry regulations, people are designated by their name and surname.
On the other hand, the Supreme Court annulled this judgment by upholding the appeal of the interested party. The court argued that it was not coherent to recognize the right to be forgotten when the search is carried out from the full name of a person and deny it when it was carried out only from the two surnames of the person, this implied not taking into account the general principles of the Law of the European Union.
Therefore, the Chamber considered that the criterion maintained in the contested judgment lacked support and would imply restricting, unjustifiably, the right to require the manager of a search engine to remove it from the list of results, owned by the person affected.