An individual contacted a search engine company to request that a number of websites remove articles about them that contained their name, as they believed the articles were no longer relevant to their current life and circumstances. The search engine organisation replied to them and outlined that their requests did not fulfil the criteria for it to remove them. The individual was unhappy with this response and contacted the DPC to make a complaint. 

The DPC began its examination of the complaint by asking the company for the reasons why it believed that the individual’s Article 17 rights under the GDPR did not apply to the individual’s request. The company responded that it was under the understanding that only the links to articles that arise from a search of the individual’s full name can qualify for consideration when requests are made  under Article 17 of the GDPR. In other words, the search engine will separate the  automatic appearance of those URLs when the individual’s full name is searched for in its results listing.  However, the original articles remain online on the websites that posted them. 

When the individual had made their request to the company, they had listed a series of URLs that contained their full (first and last) name. However when the organisation performed a search of the individual’s full name the URLs they had specified did not appear in the results listing and therefore did not fall under the scope of Article 17 of the GDPR. In this instance after performing searches under the individual’s full name the DPC did not find the URLs that they had requested be delisted and therefore found that on this occasion the right to be forgotten under Article 17 of the GDPR was not applicable.