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Originally Posted by Ammi

..but then if it's private information, how would it be on the internet..?..

Hmm well I suppose it might not be private exactly, but quite personal that were it not for the internet would have been buried and forgotten about long ago. This article goes into it a bit more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27394751

Sixteen years ago, a Spaniard named Mario Costeja Gonzalez had hit financial difficulties.

To solve them, a property of his was put up for auction - the details of which were covered in a newspaper, which subsequently went online.

The auction happened in 1998, and with those troubles now behind him, Mr Gonzalez is keen to move on.

But there's a problem: whenever you search for his name, news about the auction still features prominently. He argued that this continued to damage his reputation, and should be removed from Google's search results.

On Tuesday, the Luxembourg-based Court of Justice of the European Union agreed with him, and in doing so set a major precedent over what is referred to as the "right to be forgotten".

What is the 'right to be forgotten'?

The internet (almost) never forgets.

Google - and other search engines - are extremely efficient at crawling the web to find and store data. Even if websites are taken offline, a cache is kept - meaning they can still be accessed.

This is good for making the web as useful as possible, but bad if you don't like what it finds about you.

In Mr Gonzalez's case, Google must now remove the search results that come up about the auction of his property.

It is Mr Gonzalez's right, the EU says, for that information to be confined to history - or at least, a history only findable by the very dedicated. The information will still be online, just not indexed by the search engine.

The decision has wide-reaching implications.

The EU has been pushing heavily for a new law on data privacy - of which "right to be forgotten" is a key component - since it proposed guidelines in January 2012.

It argues that old, inaccurate or even just irrelevant data should be taken out of search results if the person involved requests it.

Eventually, the EU hopes the "right to be forgotten" principle will extend further. Those drunken pictures from your university days? The EU thinks you should have the right to demand that social networks get rid of them completely - as well as any bit of data on you they may hold.

If the full proposals are passed, firms that do not comply with the law could be fined around 1% of their global revenues.

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