The right to forget continues to raise doubts about its limits and its scope of application. In this regard, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) continues to refine the definition of this digital suppression right and yesterday issued a resolution in which it considers that it can not be applied in relation to the personal data collected in the registers of Companies as requested by an Italian citizen, sole administrator of a company, who invoked it to delete data linking him to a previous company that entered into a competition of creditors in 1992 and was liquidated in 2005.
However, the European Court also notes that after the expiration of a sufficiently long period of time, after the liquidation of the company in question, Member States could establish restricted access of third parties to these data in exceptional cases.
With regard to the first aspect, the judgment of the CJEU states that one of the relevant issues in the advertising of company registrations is to ensure legal certainty in the relationship between companies and third parties and to protect, inter alia, the interests of the latter Limited companies and limited liability companies, as these companies only offer their social assets as collateral.
For Joaquín Muñoz, director of the area of new technologies of Ontier, the decision of the CJEU seems logical, since "both the sentence on the right to forget and the resolutions of the Spanish Agency for Data Protection leave out the removal of personal data Those that are related to entrepreneurs, that is, that can be applied to the personal sphere, but not the professional. "
Data provision
On the other hand, the court observes that situations where personal data collected in these registers may be required, even when many years have elapsed since the liquidation of a company, given the multitude of legal rights and relationships that may arise. Linking a society with actors in several EU states and the heterogeneity of the statute of limitations provided by the different national regulations. The CJEU explains in this regard that it is impossible to identify a single deadline for the expiration of the necessary registration of this personal data in the register and its advertising.
In view of these circumstances, the European Court concludes that the Member States can not guarantee to natural persons, whose information is part of the register of companies, the right to obtain after a certain period from the liquidation the removal of the personal data that They concern
For Norman Heckh, Ramón y Cajal Abogados information technology partner, the publication of this ruling is positive because it serves to delimit the areas of application of this right of digital suppression. "People have to understand that the right to oblivion is not absolute and is granted in a limited way, studying case by case. It is not positive to abuse this tool, as in this matter, but the decision is positive to delimit and better know this New right ".
Privacy
Another issue that also speaks the ECJ's resolution is the alleged interference in the right to privacy and data protection. The European Court explains that in no case can it be considered as disproportionate, since only a limited number of personal data are registered in the register of companies and that in this register it is fully justified that natural persons are obliged To make public the data relating to their identity.
Tax requirements
The judgment of the CJEU of 13 May 2014 stated that the exercise of the right to forget could be carried out against search engines only with respect to the results obtained in the searches made by the name of the person. In addition, it set requirements such that only a natural person can act, that there is no public interest and that a certain time has elapsed since the publication.
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