On 23 December 2020, the Italian DPA (“Garante”) announced publishing a decision on the right to be forgotten, following an individual complaint from a data subject claiming that a newspaper article written by his father, now deceased, had to be removed from the web.
In a nutshell, Garante indicated that for a deceased person’s article to be removed, there must be an effective interest to be protected, as well as relevant reasons that are not in contrast with the removal. Thus, Garante concluded the claimant’s request was not founded, considering that the conservation of the article was necessary to testify to the author’s life and freedom of expression. Nevertheless, Garante ordered the web manager to make the article not accessible through external search engines in order to balance the conservation needs with the interests of the author’s family.
The full press release is available here, and the decision is available here (both only in Italian).
