(CN) - An adviser to Europe's highest court said Tuesday that Google and other internet search engines bear no responsibility to remove personal information from their indexes.
Advocate General Niilo Jaaskinen's opinion comes on the heels of announcements that Spain, France and the U.K. have launched investigations into whether Google's privacy practices flout EU law after European regulators took no action on a deadline issued last year.
Tuesday's opinion stems from an electronic newspaper story -- published in 1998 -- about a Spanish foreclosure auction prompted by social security debts. The story identified the property owner, who discovered a decade later that the proceedings still came up when he typed his name into Google's search engine.
The owner demanded that the newspaper erase the online version of the story, as the proceedings had been resolved long ago and the references to him no longer applied. Finding no resolution with the newspaper, the man asked Google Spain to remove the offending links.
He also filed a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) against the newspaper and Google. In 2010, the agency ordered Google Spain and California-based Google Inc. to remove the links -- and dismissed the case against the newspaper.
Google lodged two appeals with Spain's high court seeking to annul AEPD's order. That court referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union for clarification of the EU's data privacy laws.
In his opinion -- which is not binding on the EU high court -- Jaaskinen noted that this is the first case involving Europe's data privacy laws and internet search engines. He also pointed at the laws have not been amended since they were adopted in 1995 and that Google has changed the internet world immeasurably since then.
However, EU law doesn't expressly regulate to search engines, particularly ones -- like Google -- that receive no payment for providing search services. And in many instances, search engines receive personal information from users themselves or source webpages like the newspaper in question, according to Jaaskinen.
Furthermore, any applicable law does not extend outside European territory unless the search engine has also set up shop in an EU member state. Google Spain only handles targeted advertising to Spanish users, but information on the exact geographical location of its search engines hasn't been made public, the adviser noted.
For the future, Jaaskinen proposed that the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice adopt a finding where any search engine that opens an office in the EU for the purpose of selling advertising also processes personal data within the EU. But he also noted that processing personal data does not always mean controlling it under the outdated EU law.
