When the name of the former artist manager was entered into Google, a reference to an article in NRC Handelsblad appeared. The article mentioned the manager's full name and discussed the details of a criminal trial. The article is now ten years old.
Google did not want to remove the reference, partly because of the public interest of the information: the NRC article was the only search result that referred to information about the artist manager's multiple criminal convictions. Google argued that the article was relevant for assessing the professional integrity of the artist manager. Furthermore, the NRC article did not contain any personal information about the applicant's private life and was not unnecessarily hurtful.
However, the court ruled that there was no sufficiently special and compelling public interest. The conviction concerned a minor offense resulting in 80 hours of community service, and there was no evidence that the criminal case had attracted public interest. In this case, the right to respect for private life and the right to protection of personal data therefore outweigh the economic interest of the search engine operator and the legitimate interest of internet users who may have access to the search results in question.
