Which one of us, someone once, has not inserted his own generalities into a search engine to see what is said about us online? When an engineer did, he realized that the search engine was redirecting websites that offered fake news about and defamatory. The original source of the fake news had already been convicted of a past criminal sentence that became res judicata; the technician asked Google to cancel all URLs that appeared at the time of typing its name, but the computer giant did so only partially.

Claiming that it passed unlawful personal data processing in accordance with Articles 7 and 11 of Decree Law 196/2003 with consequent injury to the proper confidentiality, reputation and honor, the professional referred the Tribunal de Milano.

The judgment – In its articulated judgment (Court of Milano, Section I, 24 January 2020) the Court primarily recognised the passive standing only in capo to Google LLC, responsible for the processing of personal data, gives the opinion Google Italia SRL, a national instrument used from the group exclusively for marketing, search and advertising collection activities at the national level.

On the services offered by Google LLC, the Court recalled how this has to be considered an ISP, ensuring the collection, memorization and indexing of third parties subjects, offering all users always more decisive services in the global dissemination of data.

Google LLC is not responsible for the content of the news on the sites viewable as a result of the search, and conessibly, cannot be liable for the content, possibly defamatory, of them. For these reasons, companies that manage search engines cannot be asked to cancel the contents of the web pages (Article 15 Decree Law 70/2003).

At this point, but, I was at the heart of the situation: asking Google LLC not to immediately make available to users the web pages of the ABOVE URLs above, the engineer simply requested a host provider (an activity regulated since the aforementioned Decree 70/2003) that is to say an autonomous responsible.
According to the judge, a self-manager, explaining the reasons.

Google LLC, as well as other second generation search engines, observe the web through software applications called “spider” that collect and memorize the contents of the sites, successively, by a very complex algorithm the contents are made available based on the search keys entered by the users themselves. So the autonomy of data processing is in this; Google LLC collects all content and returns them to users using secret software.

The Court concludes: “If – as is peaceful – the association between the claimant’s name and the sites on which he defined himself as a mobster is simple operates the software developed and adopted by Google […] it cannot be able to obtain the direct burden on the company, in the title of contractual responsibility, of the possible negative effects that the application of this system for the processing of personal acts of the data subject can determine. ”

In practice, the company that manages a search engine is a self-employed manager, as a service provider for data aggregation and data indexing. Therefore, when Google LLC received a request for a defamation conviction (demonstrating the falsity of the news contained on the origin sites), Google LLC would have to provide the dis- Having failed to do so, it was ordered to pay the damage.

SOURCE: FEDERPRIVACY