Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

On September 18, 2014, the Article 29 Working Party (the “Working Party”) announced its decision to establish a common approach to the right to be forgotten (the “tool-box”). This tool-box will be used by all EU data protection authorities (“DPAs”) to help address complaints from search engine users whose requests to delete their search result links containing their personal data were refused by the search engines. The development of the tool-box follows the Working Party’s June 2014 meeting discussing the consequences of the European Court of Justice’s judgment in Costeja of May 13, 2014.

The Working Party reports that the DPAs have received numerous complaints from search engine users concerning the right to be forgotten, which demonstrates the need for such a tool-box.

As part of this “tool-box,” the Working Party intends to put in place a network of dedicated contact persons within the DPAs in order to develop common case-handling criteria for the complaints relating to the right to be forgotten. This network shall provide the DPAs with (1) a common record of decisions regarding the right to be forgotten, and (2) a dashboard to be used to identify the different types of complaints and highlight similarities.

The Working Party also announced that it will continue to analyze how search engines comply with the Judgment.

On the same day, the European Commission published a factsheet on the Working Party’s website concerning the “myths” related to the right to be forgotten.