CYIL vol. 12 (2021)

CYIL 12 (2021) THE GLOBAL REACH OF THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN THROUGH THE LENSES … and information. 28 The desire to allow individuals to demand the deletion of data that they no longer want to disclose to the public is understandable. However, according to many experts, this right should not in any way violate or restrict the freedom of the press and allow individuals to demand that legitimate and correct information in news archives be hidden or deleted. 29 Otherwise, the Internet space will be filled with inactive links and dead-end information (information cul-de-sacs ) because of the judgment of the CJEU. By introducing such new standards for the protection of personal data, the CJEU forces any Internet company to follow the rules set out in this judgment, even if such a company de facto operates outside the EU. Obviously, the Court’s judgment should raise questions about the extraterritorial nature of both the right to be forgotten and the GDPR in general. The questions of the interpretation of the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC 30 (hereinafter – “DPD”) raised in preliminary ruling were assessed in the light of the GDPR “in order to ensure that its answers will in any event be of use to the referring court”. 31 So, the Court dispelled doubts about the possibility of transferring the conclusions of this case to the new legal regime, but it did not resolve the issue of the territorial application of this legal instrument. Thus, the CJEU, having made a judgment that does not have any evaluation criteria or guidelines for national courts on how to implement it, has opened a way for endless judicial debate. Problems related to the implementation of this judgment of the CJEU by the national courts of the EU member States have caused the Court to start receiving preliminary requests. As Y. Padova states: “The ‘right to be forgotten’ (…) continues its judicial saga as it is being examined by the very same Court that created it, following the submission of 11 preliminary questions by the French Conseil d’État before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU)”. 32 3. The CNIL case: general provisions In 2015 the French Data Protection Authority (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (hereinafter – CNIL)) notified Google of its obligation to remove links from all versions of its search engine worldwide. The CNIL held the position that removing links about an individual on the French version of Google is not enough to protect human rights. To do this, Google should exclude links from the list everywhere. The CNIL considered it insufficient to exclude links from all extensions operating in the EU, as well as from all search queries conducted in France, since Internet users located in France can still access other versions outside the EU. Nevertheless, Google refused to remove face data from all versions of its search engine and continued to restrict links only in versions of its search engines with domain extensions within the EU. In March 2016, Google tried to compromise with the CNIL and somehow to change the situation. It proposed the implementation of 28 See BERT-JAAPKOOPS.: Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows: A Critical Analysis of the “Right to Be Forgotten” in Big Data Practice. SCRIPTED . 2011. vol. 8. issue 3. Available at: https://script-ed.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/12/koops.pdf. 29 International New York Times, May 15, 2014. «Ordering Google to forget», p. 8. 30 Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A31995L0046. 31 Case C-507/17 Google LLC v CNIL , para. 41. 32 PADOVA, Y.: Is the right to be forgotten a universal, regional, or ‘glocal’ right? International Data Privacy Law . 2019. Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 15.

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