By Order of 24 November 2022 no. 34658 of the First Civil Section of the Court of Cassation, the judges, upholding the appeal of the Data Protection Authority against Google Llc, Google Italy Srl and reforming the decision of the Court of Milan of September 2020, which had limited the measure taken by the Garante in October 2017, reducing it to an order to remove the results url on the European versions of the search engine only, have established that the scope of application of the principles dictated by GDPR 679/2016, with reference to the application of the right to be forgotten and, in particular, de-indexing, may go beyond European geographical borders, with legal, economic and commercial repercussions in relations between the EU and non-EU countries.
The judges stated that Union law “does not require Member States to ensure that a data subject availing him/herself of the right to de-indexing can obtain the result of affecting all versions, including non-European versions, of the search engine“, and yet “nor does it prohibit the Member States from allowing this result “, so that “Each Member State – and so Italy – is free to carry out in its national legislation, in accordance with national standards of protection of fundamental rights, a balancing act between the right of the person concerned to the protection of his or her private life and to the protection of his or her personal data and the right to freedom of information, in order to require the operator of that search engine to carry out de-indexing on all versions of its engine, including those outside Europe“.
Therefore, without prejudice to the verification in each individual case of the prerequisites and the balance between the individual’s right to the protection of his or her privacy and personal data and the right to freedom of information, in order to implement the right to be forgotten, the Italian authorities (the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali and the judicial authorities) may order, in accordance with EU law and national law, search engine operators to carry out a worldwide de-indexing (so-called global delisting), thus also affecting search engine versions outside the non-EU territory.
