In 1991, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article centered on a dispute between Madrid plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti Russo and one of his patients over an allegedly botched breast surgery. The headline: "The Risk of Wanting to Be Slim."
Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Guidotti Russo, backed by Spain's privacy regulator, contends that the tale of the dispute is personal information and wants to purge the article from Google, where it shows up on the first page of results when his name is searched.
His complaint accounts for one of about 80 instances in which the Spanish regulator has told U.S.-based Google Inc. to remove personal information about individuals from its search results.
Google says it plans to challenge most of those orders, arguing that the agency is overstepping its authority.
In January, a Spanish court heard the first five complaints that Google is contesting, including Dr. Guidotti Russo's. Now, after weeks of deliberation, the Spanish court is considering referring the matter to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to clarify European privacy law, according to a person familiar with the situation.
"We're pleased that the [Spanish] court is considering asking guidance from Europe's top court on whether Spain's [data-protection agency] has overridden European law. It shows that key issues are at stake," Peter Barron, Google's head of European external relations, said in a statement.
Such a referral could pave the way for a major Europe-wide ruling on the indexing of personal data on the Web—but it also could delay a resolution for years. European lawmakers in Brussels, meanwhile, are working on an overhaul of the same European Union data-protection law the Luxembourg court could be asked to interpret.
The legal wrangle between Google and the Spanish regulator comes amid a broader debate about how much control individuals should have over their private data and reputations in the era of the Internet.
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