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The Plaintiff requested the suppression of information available on a legal website regarding a labor suit he filed. The website was listed on Google search. The Plaintiff alleged that the labor suit might have been a reason making hard for him to be hired by other companies. The judge considered that the publicity of decisions by the court is based on the principle of transparency. The interest in maintaining case-law registers and the publicity of the decisions shall prevail over the Plaintiff’s interests, once it does not affect his private life, honour, image or other personality rights. Hence, the judge did not apply he right to be forgotten.

The SMS v. Google case illustrates the confusions surrounding the expression “right to be forgotten”. Brought against the search engine Google Brasil, the action required the delisting of images of the plaintiff based on searches using her name. After the case was dismissed in the first instance, the State Court of São Paulo (2nd instance) affirmed that Google should not index the content because there was no public interest in accessing it and that it would violate the human dignity value. Google appealed, arguing that the plaintiff should indicate the specific URLs to be blocked, based on the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet requirement that court orders identify clearly the infringing content. In this case, the Court first affirmed that the decision appealed is based on a “right to be forgotten”, and defined...

Although this case does not refer to internet intermediaries, the final decision will serve as an important background to understand the current debate on a “right to be forgotten” in Brazil. In this case, the Superior Tribunal of Justice affirmed a “right to be forgotten” of the plaintiff who had his name cited and associated to the armed struggle (a bomb attack at an airport in the State of Pernambuco) against the ongoing military dictatorship in the country. In this specific case, the name of the plaintiff was mentioned during an interview of a third person to the newspaper Diário de Pernambuco. The interview had a focus on important historical facts about communism and the resistance against the military regime in Brazil. The decision noted that the country approved an amnesty law in 1979, forgiving crimes of...

First instance judges ordered the suspension of the instant messaging service WhatsApp in four different cases in Brazil, leading to an effective block in three cases. The suspensions (blocking orders directed at ISPs) were determined to force the company to cooperate with law enforcement authorities by handling data about the individuals being criminally investigated. The circumstances of all the cases are not entirely clear, since some of the decisions and procedures were not public in order to protect the investigation efforts. In the two most recent cases - one in April 2016 (issued in the State of Sergipe) and the other in July 2016 (issue in the State of Rio de Janeiro) -, however, the decisions were eventually made public, exposing that authorities were seeking for a real-time interception of messages sent using...

The Plaintiff sought the delisting of her artistic name “Meg Mellilo” from the Google search results. The judge stated that the right to be forgotten was not applicable, since the Plaintiff on her own will always related her image to erotism and pornography. During the lawsuit she did not demonstrate to be concern about her privacy, which makes unjustified the request to hide past conducts that are still perfomed at present time.