Court case 6806/2023 – Court Ruling (Italy, 2023)
General GDPR enforcement action
This case relates to broader data protection obligations, not specifically to cookie or consent banner compliance. It is not included in cookie statistics or the Risk Calculator.
Italy's Court of Cassation ruled on a case where a man wanted an old online article about his criminal past removed. The court found that while the article was removed, the man was not entitled to damages because the article was not deemed unnecessary for public debate. This case highlights the complexities of the right to erasure, especially for content published before GDPR.
What happened
A man requested the removal of an old online article about his criminal past and sought damages after it affected his personal life.
Who was affected
The man whose past criminal conviction was revealed to his friends and girlfriend through an old online article.
What the authority found
The court decided that the right to erasure requires a significant change in the person's situation and that the article's removal did not warrant damages.
Why this matters
This ruling clarifies that the right to erasure under data protection laws requires a clear change in personal circumstances. It also underscores that content published before GDPR may not automatically be subject to the same rules, affecting how historical articles are handled.
GDPR Articles Cited
The data subject was tried and convicted in a criminal proceeding. He served his sentence in prison and started a new life afterwards. He found a job, made new friends and was in a romantic relationship. After some time, his girlfriend and friends became aware of the data subject’s criminal past through an article published on an online newspaper 18 years before the facts at issue. Shocked, they decided to cut any relationship with the data subject. The data subject asked the controller the removal of the content, which was no longer necessary to pursue journalistic freedom to inform, and compensation for damages suffered due to the publication. The controller removed the article, but refused to compensate the data subject. The controller objected that it did not have an obligation to remove all the contents from its website that were no longer relevant for the public debate. The court of first instance upheld the controller’s view and rejected the data subject’s claim for damages. As the facts dated back to a time when the GDPR was not yet in force, the Court of Cassation denied that the Regulation was applicable at the facts at issue. To the contrary, Directive 95/46/EC regulated the matter. However, the legal reasoning developed by the court substantially follows the structure of Article 17 GDPR and therefore constitutes a relevant interpretation of such a provision. The Court of Cassation upheld the judgement of first instance. According to the judges, a necessary element in the right to erasure is a gap between a depiction of the data subject which is no longer updated and the current situation of the latter. This gap is assessed from the point of view of the data subject, as they are in the best position to evaluate what does no longer correspond to the present. Therefore, the right to erasure can be activated only by the explicit request of the data subject to the controller. The court also stressed that an excessively broad interpretation of the right to
Outcome
Court Ruling
A ruling by a national court on a data-protection matter.
Related Cases (0)
No other cases found for Court case 6806/2023 in IT
This is the only recorded case for this entity in this jurisdiction.
Details
About this data
Cite as: Cookie Fines. Court case 6806/2023 - Italy (2023). Retrieved from cookiefines.eu
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