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The Problem with Europe's 'Right to Be Forgotten'

By Ben Feuer

Mario Costeja Gonz'lez was a tax cheat. In 1998, years of dodging social security taxes finally caught up with the 43-year-old Spaniard. To pay his tax debt, the government seized the Barcelona resident's condo and threw it on the auction block. The debtor's sale garnered a brief, 36-word mention in the property blotter of a local newspaper, La Vanguardia.

Twelve years later, Gonz'lez was back on top. He built a successful consulting firm and dutifully paid his taxes for more than a decade. But in 2010, La Vanguardia digitized its old articles, opening them up for indexing by search engines. When Gonz'lez searched for himself on Google, he found the short debtor's sale article mentioning his name on the first page of results.

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