More hope under a Right to be Forgotten

Google is not the sole decision makers of whether you can have information about you removed from the internet

In a recent court case, a Dutch Surgeon that had been initially suspended by the disciplinary panel because of her postoperative care of a patient, was refused by Google with her right to be forgotten application but the argument was that she had had her suspension lifted after an appeal, to a conditional suspension, which meant that she was allowed to continue to practise.

The court heard that people had found her name on a medical blacklist via Google and it was being discussed on a web forum.

Google argued that people wanted to know if doctors had been disciplined and they have difficulty finding out the information from the register but the judge said that it was a perfectly easy system to find out any information.

Google and the Dutch data privacy watchdog initially rejected attempts to have the links removed on the basis that the doctor was still on probation and the information remained relevant.

The judge said that while the information on the website with reference to the failings of the doctor in 2014 was correct, the pejorative name of the blacklist site that her name was linked to, if you typed her name into Google, suggested she was unfit to treat people.
The discipline committee is all about correcting the doctor’s mistake, so that they can do the job next time. It isn’t meant to be a punishment.

So, in what is said to be the first right to be forgotten case involving medical negligence by a doctor, the district court of Amsterdam subsequently ruled that the surgeon had “an interest in not indicating that every time someone enters their full name in Google’s search engine, (almost) immediately the mention of her name appears on the ‘blacklist of doctors’, and this importance adds more weight than the public’s interest in finding this information in this way.”

The surgeon has now won the case in the courts to remove search results from Google in a landmark right to be forgotten case.

The surgeon’s lawyer, Willem van Lynden, from the Amsterdam firm MediaMaze, said the ruling was groundbreaking in ensuring doctors would no longer be judged by Google on their fitness to practise. Google has always had the authority over what should be kept on the internet, even overriding a medical disciplinary panel, so this is great news!

Ruling will ensure doctors are no longer judged by Google on whether they are fit to practise

“Now they will have to bring down thousands of pages: that is what will happen, in my view.” said Mr. van Lynden.

“Google have decided whether to take a page down before now and why do they have that position?” he said.

Since the ruling, Van Lynden said he had sought the removal of the details of 15 doctors from the blacklist, all of which involved minor disciplinary action, but only half of which had been accepted.

The case was concluded in July 2018 but only made public in recent weeks after a dispute over whether the court’s judgment itself should be published.

You may only get one chance to get your right to be forgotten application right. Google may turn down your request if they think it is in the public’s interest to know something about you and that decision could lock you up into a Google loop forever-more. It could be outdated information or a personal preference that has an employee at Google decide on your decision about wanting information about yourself removed from the internet.

Cohen Davis are a specialist award-winning internet law firm and we want to help you get that application right. For all internet law enquiries, call 0800 612 7211 or visit us here for more information.

Yair Cohen

Google is not the sole decision makers of whether you can have information about you removed from the internet