Privacy and Search Engines: Forgetting or Contextualizing?

This article considers the much-criticized 'right to be forgotten' in the context of the European Court of Justice's judgment in the Google Spain case. It defends the 'right to be forgotten' as a metaphor that can provide us with a better understanding of the particular privacy con- cerns of the search-engine age and their interaction with the freedom to access information, and draws on Goffman's idea of 'information games' and Nissenbaum's theory of 'contextual integrity'. While sup- porting the principles that underpin the judgment, the article rejects the Court's binary approach of 'forgetting' versus 'remembering' personal information. Instead, it argues that the EU legislator should introduce more nuanced means of addressing modern privacy con- cerns. By establishing two remedies - 'delisting' or 'reordering', depending on the nature of the information - online information flows can be adjusted to preserve both the right to privacy and the freedom to access information in more contextually appropriate ways.