DPA case 9747505 – Complaint Upheld (Italy, 2022)

A data subject had entered a public competition for a job post, which ended in July 2019. The local authority that launched the competition published information related to the selection process, including which candidates had been admitted and which ones had not admitted to the oral exam, along with each candidate’s score in the preliminary phase. In March 2021, the data subject requested Google to remove the search results which associated his name to this selection process, but Google did not grant this request. This prompted the data subject to issue a complaint against Google with the Italian DPA (Garante). The subject claimed that there was no relevant public interest reason for this information, which he considered to be excessively detrimental, to show up when his name was researched on Google, in particular because this information did not constitute a final ranking of merit, but rather a mere intermediate evaluation with relative scores. Additionally, the data subject noted that according to national law, a final merit ranking’s legal validity status is three years, and hence an intermediate document's validity within this evaluation process should reasonably run out in a shorter time. In their defense, Google claimed that the information was published on the institutional website of a public authority, and considered that because the publication was relatively recent, and was only related to the complainant’s professional career, the conditions for exercising the right to be forgotten were not met. The Garante noted that since the competition in question had ended since July 2019, the publication of data relating to the intermediate stages of the public competition procedure did not appear to correspond to a specific public interest. Therefore, the Garante held that the accessibility of this information should not prevail over the individual's data protection rights, especially in light of the fact that it is causing him disproportionate prejudice, cit