CYIL vol. 12 (2021)

Ondrej Hamuľák – Lusine Vardanyan – Hovsep Kocharyan CYIL 12 (2021) Another issue as AdvocateGeneral Szpunar stated in hisOpinion delivered on 10 January 2019 on the case of Google v. CNIL is the territoriality principle, 8 which is highly debatable. In turn, M. Taylor even considers the global removal of information as an illustration of ineffective jurisdictional excess. 9 Therefore, it is not surprising that the national Data Protection Authorities (DPAs) and the courts have encountered serious difficulties in interpreting and applying the right to be forgotten, which was the reason for a large number of preliminary requests sent to the CJEU. Thus, in September 2019 the CJEU accepted the case of Google v. CNIL 10 , the request for a preliminary ruling on which the above case is based was specifically concerned with the geographical scope of the right to be forgotten. Many scholars interpreted the judgment of the CNIL case as a territorial restriction on the right to be forgotten. In particular, as M. Samonte believes: “By explicitly limiting the territorial scope of the right to be forgotten, the Court may seem to have inadvertently limited the impact and protective effect of this right.” 11 However, is it possible to consider such an interpretation as unambiguous? We believe that it is not, taking into account the open possibility of interpreting the CNIL case in a different way – as creating conditions for a global right to be forgotten, i.e. as “a floor, not a ceiling”. 12 This trend has become even more clearly visible in the case of Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Limited. 13 2. The right to be forgotten: The pre- CNIL situation and the main problems. In 2014 in the Google Spain case, the CJEU established the “right to be forgotten”, which gave a legal opportunity to ask the operator of any search engine to remove certain links to information that infringes on the data subject’s rights and affects his/her privacy in conditions when “(…) that information appears, having regard to all the circumstances of the case, to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes of the processing at issue carried out by the operator of the search engine (…)” . 14 It means that after receiving a request from a data subject to remove links, the search engine operator must determine whether this information is “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive” or not, and in the case when the data subject’s request is denied by such search engine operator, the data subject has the right to apply to the court for protection of his / her personal data. Of course, it should be noted that the emergence of the phenomenon of the right to be forgotten in the EU’s legal reality can clearly be considered as a step forward in the 8 Opinion Of Advocate General Szpunar delivered on 10 January 2019, Case C-507/17 Google LLC, successor in law to Google Inc. v Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL) , para. 45. Available at: https:// eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A62017CC0507. 9 TAYLOR, M.: Google Spain Revisited: The Misunderstood Implementation of a Landmark Decision and How Public International Law Could Offer Guidance . European Data Protection Law Review . 2017. vol. 3, issue 2, pp. 195–208. 10 Case C-507/17 Google LLC, successor in law to Google Inc. v Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (CNIL), ECLI:EU:C:2019:772 (hereinafter – “Google LLC v CNIL” ). 11 SAMONTE, M.: Google v CNIL Case C-507/17: The Territorial Scope of the Right to be Forgotten Under EU Law. 2019. Available at: https://europeanlawblog.eu/2019/10/29/google-v-cnil-case-c-507-17-the-territorial- scope-of-the-right-to-be-forgotten-under-eu-law/. 12 Ibid . 13 Case C-18/18 Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland Limited , ECLI:EU:C:2019:821, para. 55. Hereinafter – “Piesczek v. Facebook”. 14 Case C-131/12 Google Inc. Spain SL and Google Inc. v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos (AEPD) and Mario Costeja Gonzales, ECLI:EU:C:2014:317 (hereinafter – the “Google Spain”), para. 94.

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