Google Ireland Limited – Court Ruling (Germany, 2024)

The data subject filed a lawsuit with the first instance court, the Regional Court of Cologne (“Landgerichts Köln”) seeking injunctive relief. The data subject further requested the court to order Google Ireland Limited (the controller) to erase search results that linked to an article which contained false information about the data subject and included a photograph of the data subject that infringed the data subject’s copyright. The article used the photograph to make allegations of the data subject. The photograph was taken by the data subject’s wife, who did not give the website the right to use the photograph for the mentioned article. The first instance court agreed with Google Ireland's view that they are not the controller, but the US based Google Limited Liability Company (LLC), because they make the decisions about how to respond to a search query and how the relevant search results are displayed. Google LLC was also named as the controller in the privacy policy. Although Google Ireland Limited operates the Google search engine in Germany and other European countries, it had no influence on how the search results were generated. The court therefore dismissed the action for injunctive relief and request for erasure. The data subject appealed the decision of the first instance court for failing to recognise that Google Ireland Limited is a controller under Article 4(7) GDPR. It further requested the court to erase the search results related to the article with inaccurate information of the data subject. On whether Google Ireland Limited is a controller The court disagreed with the first instance court and held that Google Ireland Limited is the controller. The court held that it is irrelevant whether the controller only offers access to the search engine and took into account the CJEU judgement in C-131/12 - Google Spain and C-231/22 - Belgian State and held that the mere display of information containing personal data constitutes the processing of such d