District Court of Berlin: Google Germany not responsible for ‘right to be forgotten’-requests

On 21 August 2014, the District Court of Berlin ruled (27 O 293/14, German) that the subsidiary of Google in Germany, Google Germany GmbH, is not responsible for the fulfillment of requests of natural persons under the so called ‘right to be forgotten’, created by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in its much-noticed judgment in May 2014 (C-131/12). The Berlin court held that only the American company, Google Inc., can be regarded as the ‘data controller’ in the sense of European data protection law because only Google Inc. is the operator of the search engine. As a consequence, legal actions must be brought against Google Inc., not the subsidiary in Hamburg. Natural persons who want a link to third party websites to be removed from the search result list following a search made on the basis of a person’s name would therefore have to sue Google Inc. and not the European subsidiary.
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“Google Has Few Concerns About the Right to be Forgotten!”

Until last year, the right to be forgotten used to be an idea of Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an Austrian law professor. He suggested – and probably still suggests – providing a “best before date” for data that is electronically saved. After the expiration of the date, the data would be automatically deleted by the application or computer system. Last year, the idea – or a modification thereof – became part of a draft regulation of the European Commission. Continue reading