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Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González is a decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union. It held that an Internet search engine operator is responsible for the processing that it carries out of personal information which appears on web pages published by third parties.
The outcome of the ruling is that an Internet search engine must consider requests from individuals to remove links to freely accessible web pages resulting from a search on their name. Grounds for removal include cases where the search result "appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive in the light of the time that had elapsed." If the search engine rejects the request, the individual may ask relevant authorities to consider the case. Under certain conditions, the search engine may be ordered to remove the links from search results.
The decision was claimed as a so-called right to be forgotten, although the Court did not explicitly grant such a right, depending instead on the data subject's rights deriving from Article 7 and Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
The General Data Protection Regulation was mooted to include a right to be forgotten, but between the draft and the final version this was changed to a right to request erasure for a set of specific reasons.