Criminals to win right to be forgotten online

Judge backs businessman who asked Google to remove information about his prison sentence

CRIMINALS could be granted the “right to be forgotten”, after Google lost a landmark High Court case against a businessman who asked the search engine to remove information about his spent conviction.

The man, who cannot be identified, had a spent conviction for conspiracy to carry out surveillance and had been sent to prison for six months.

Mr Justice Warby, sitting in the High Court, said his offending and sentence, which was served over a decade ago, was “of little if any relevance” to future business activity and ordered that the links should be “delisted”.

“The crime and punishment information has become out of date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users of Google search to justify its continued availability, so that an appropriate delisting order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,” he said.

The claimant had a young second family, as well as adult children, which added to his case for privacy under the Human Rights Act, the judge said. The judge did not award any damages.

Another case, heard in a separate trial but contained in the same ruling, failed as the judge ruled an unrelated claimant, who is also anonymous, “has not accepted his guilt, has misled the public and this court, and shows no remorse over any of these matters”.

The judge added that the information in the second case “retains sufficient relevance” to the man’s current life and business practices.

In that case the claimant had been convicted of conspiracy to account falsely and sent to prison for four years.

The cases were the first of their kind to be heard in England, and the ruling could have implications for criminals who want to remove information about a conviction from search engines.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns to promote digital freedom, said: “The right to be forgotten is meant to apply to information that is no longer relevant but disproportionately impacts a person. Spent convictions are rather different. The right of people to rehabilitation is an important one.

“The court will have to balance the public’s right to access the historical record, the precise impacts on the person, and the public interest.”

Both men challenged Google’s refusal to remove some links which contained information about their criminal past. Their claims were brought under data protection law and for “misuse of private information.

The “right to be forgotten” was established in 2014 when the European Court of Justice said links to irrelevant and outdated material should be erased from searches on request.

Some 669,355 requests for links to be removed from the search engine results have been made to Google since the ruling, around half of which were successful. The most affected website is Facebook, with 18,723 links removed.

The ruling was made on a case by Mario Costeja González, a Spaniard who wanted two articles from 1998, relating to a real-estate auction after he got into debt, deleted from searches.

A spokesman for Google said: “We work hard to comply with the right to be forgotten, but we take great care not to remove search results that are in the public interest and will defend the public’s right to access lawful information. We are pleased that the Court recognised our efforts in this area, and we will respect the judgments they have made in this case.”