Privacy & Information Security Law Blog

Eduardo Cunha, a congressman from the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party in Rio de Janeiro, recently introduced a new bill in Brazil that provides Brazilians with a right to be forgotten (PL 7881/2014). Rep. Cunha is one of the most influential congressmen in Brazil and has been reported likely to be the next Speaker of the Brazilian House of Representatives (also translated as the “Chamber of Deputies”).

The bill has one substantive Article:

Art 1 – It is required, by request of any citizen or person involved, to remove links from Internet search engines that make reference to irrelevant or outdated data.

To help explain the right, the bill includes quotes from a newspaper article. Carolina Lessa from Reed Elsevier Inc. provided a Portuguese translation:

“Approved in May in Europe, the so-called “Right to be Forgotten” allows citizens from the continent to request the removal of links from internet search engines that make reference to information that is irrelevant or outdated. According to the site “The Observer,” Wikipedia had its first entry removed due to the new legislation.

This information was given by the founder of the digital encyclopedia Jimmy Wales, who is against the legislation. According to Wales, the page, which he did not identify, will continue online, but won’t show up in Google searches.

This legislation is controversial and has caused outrage from the European press, which after the decision by the European Court of Justice, started receiving notifications from Google about links that were removed from their search engines by request of people involved in the news.

According to the internet giant search, the company received approximately 90 thousand requests to remove links from their European results between May and last month. Due to the large amount of requests, Google was only able to remove 50% of the requested pages.

The European countries that have the most requested removals include: (1) France with 17,500 requests for 58,000 links; (2) Germany with 16,500 requests for 57,000 links; (3) the UK with 12,000 requests and 44,000 links; (4) Spain with 8,000 requests and 27,000 links; (5) Italy with 7,500 requests and 28,000 links; and (6) the Netherlands with 5,500 requests and 21,000 links.

Recently, the page “Hidden from Google” announced that they have started to list the removed links from the search engine, and said they have received tips from several collaborators.

I consider this proposal an important social demand and that’s why I request your support for its approval.”

Because this bill will not have to be approved by the plenary, it will move much faster than other bills. Instead, it has to be approved by the House Committee on Science and Technology, Communication and Informatics and the House Committee on Constitution, Justice and Citizenship. After that, it would move to the Senate.