Right to oblivion

2024: Russia adopted a law obliging all search engines to delete information about citizens at their request

On June 11, 2024, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted in the third final reading a law obliging all search engines operators to delete information about citizens at their request. The law is aimed at ensuring the "right to oblivion" on the Internet and will enter into force on October 1, 2024.

According to the new rules, search engines operators are obliged to stop issuing information about sites that provide inaccurate, irrelevant or irrelevant information about citizens, as well as information disseminated in violation of the legislation of the Russian Federation. These requirements apply to all search engines operators, regardless of whether they distribute advertising aimed at Russian consumers, which was previously limited only to advertising operators.

A law has been adopted obliging all search engines operators to delete information about citizens at their request

As noted in the explanatory note to the law, the innovations are designed to provide citizens with the opportunity to control the dissemination of personal information on the Internet. Search engines operators are now required to connect to the register of information resources, access to which is limited, within 30 working days from the date of receipt of the relevant requirement from Roskomnadzor (ILV). After accessing the registry, operators are obliged to stop issuing information about such sites within three working days.

The new norms also introduce a ban on the search for data on foreign sites that violate the laws of the Russian Federation. The decision to ban will be sent by ILV to all search engines operators within 24 hours from the moment of its adoption. Operators are obliged to stop issuing information about such sites within 24 hours from the moment of receipt of the decision.

According to the TASS agency, the changes in legislation are aimed at strengthening control over information disseminated on the Internet and protecting the rights of citizens. The law also obliges search engines operators to inform users about violations of Russian legislation by foreign resources. The corresponding marking shall be installed within 24 hours from the moment of receipt of the ILV decision.^[1]

Forget in Europe

It all started in Spain, where one citizen paid off a debt to a bank, but Google, when asking for a name, issued a link to an old article where the citizen was called a debtor. The citizen demanded that Google remove this link as untrue. The Spanish court ordered the search engine to remove the link to the article from the issue, thereby laying the foundation for "right to be forgotten." After that, other citizens began to contact search engines with similar requirements that had to be fulfilled.

In May 2014, an EU court in a privacy case against Google ruled that Internet companies should remove irrelevant or redundant personal data from search results^[2][3][4]].

Internet companies must remove irrelevant or redundant personal data from search results, the EU court ruled in a privacy case against Google, EuroNews reports.

The case involved a complaint from a resident of Spain that in search results by his name Google issued a link to a 1998 newspaper article about the seizure of the plaintiff's house for debts. According to the lawyers of the "victim," in Spain today there are about 220 complaints of this type.

The judge said Google should be required to remove personal information if it is "inadequate, irrelevant or obsolete; or redundant to the question on which it was requested. "

A Google spokesman said the company was disappointed by the decision, which infringes on freedom of expression, and added that Google takes time to analyze the possible complexities of the process.

The European Commission proposed to legalize the "right to oblivion" back in 2012. The European Parliament in 2014 softened the wording on the "right to delete" specific information. In order for this to become law, the proposal must be approved by all 28 members of the European Union. Google, Facebook and other Internet companies oppose the initiative, concerned about the additional costs of providing technical support for the search results cleaning procedure.

Google shortly after the court decision in 2014 posted a request form on its website, and then began deleting European data. However, the company makes decisions on which removal requests to satisfy itself, and also removes links to "bad materials" only from the results of European search engines (such as google.fr or google.co.uk).

CNIL said that, according to a ruling in May, Google should kill links around the world, since Google search is a single system and operates on the same principle. The American company believes that the decision said something else: "We tried to achieve an acceptable balance in accounting for European laws by cooperating with regulators. The rules apply to users from the European Union, and here we did what was expected of us. "

Forget in Russian

The State Duma approved in June 2015 in the first reading a bill on the so-called "right to oblivion." We are talking about amendments to the law "On information, IT and information protection," to the civil code, civil law code and code of administrative offenses^[5][6][7][8]

The authors of the bill are Aleksei Kazakov deputies, Vadim Dengin, Olga Kazakova and Leonid Kalashnikov. And the very idea of ​ ​ the "right to oblivion" this fall was voiced by the presidential aide, ex-Minister of Communications Igor Shchegolev.

The bill provides for the possibility for citizens to contact the operators of search engines on the Internet with the requirements to remove links to personal information about them from the search results. The information should be removed if it is unreliable or reliable, but more than three years have passed since the described event.

An exception is made for information about events that have signs of criminal offenses, provided that the deadlines for bringing to criminal responsibility have not expired, as well as for information about a citizen committing a crime for which the criminal record has not yet been removed or extinguished. After receiving the application, the search engine has three days to remove the desired links or to provide a motivated refusal.

A citizen has the right to appeal the operator's refusal in court. Lawsuits can also be filed against foreign search engines if they place ads aimed at Russian consumers. For refusing to remove links to the search engine, a fine of 100 thousand rubles will be imposed, and for sluggishness (failure to comply with the relevant court decision within five days) - 3 million rubles.

Speaking at a meeting of the State Duma, the head of the profile committee on information policy, IT and communications Leonid Levin noted that the bill requires improvements, and lawmakers are waiting for proposals from representatives of the Internet industry with amendments. Earlier, Levin said that the bill was based on the "right to oblivion," which has appeared in the European Union since last year and allows citizens to demand that search engines remove links to information about them.

Also in June 2015, it became known that from the bill "on the right to oblivion" they will exclude the norm on the obligation of search engines to remove links to reliable information, which is more than three years old.

As a source in the Duma committee on information policy, information technology and communications told Interfax, "a fundamental decision has been made" to remove this provision from the bill for the second reading.

The exclusion of the norm on the obligation of search engines to remove outdated links is one of the key amendments that are proposed to be introduced into the bill of an Internet company, Vedomosti writes. The most ^[9]

The draft amendments to the bill "on the right to oblivion," according to the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEK) and Yandex, were discussed on June 17 at a meeting of members of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy with representatives of Internet companies.

During the meeting, sources of the publication in the State Duma said, the parties agreed to exclude from the bill a provision on the removal of reliable but outdated links.

In addition to the amendment on reliable links, Internet companies proposed to fix in the document the norm obliging the user requiring the deletion of information about himself to indicate in his statement the specific address of the page that needs to be removed from the search results.

Another amendment that Internet companies insist on is to allow the exclusion of links from search results only for requests that contain a person's first and last name.

Yandex claims that all participants in the meeting agreed with the main amendments. Representatives of the State Duma, in turn, did not confirm this information, but did not deny it either.

The State Duma adopted in the III reading the law on the "right to oblivion"

The State Duma adopted in July 2015 in the third, final reading a bill that obliges search engines, at the request of a citizen, to remove links from search results that allow access to information about him.

Representatives of search engines criticized the bill and presented a number of amendments, most of which the deputies adopted.

The following industry proposals have been taken into account: changes have been made to the definition of the search engine that exclude intra-site search from falling under it, the concept of "reliability" has been eliminated, which created the risks of deleting any reliable information that has passed three years since its publication. Instead, the concept of "irrelevance" was introduced in order to approach the principles used in the European Union, allowing to eliminate references to inaccurate, inadequate and incomplete information.

The obligations of search engines to remove links to information when displaying search results for requests containing the applicant's full name have been clarified. The bill now gives searchers the right to request identification documents from the person who wrote the application to remove the links. Extended the period providing up to ten working days to correct errors in applications certifying documents.

Amendments to Article 152 of the Civil Code were excluded from the bill, which assumed that if information defaming honor, dignity or business reputation turned out to be available on the Internet, a person has the right to demand their refutation and deletion, including from persons providing information about their location on the Web. This rule was removed, since the changes in the Civil Code did not apply to the concept of the bill.

The date of entry into force of the law remained the same - from January 1, 2016.

Putin signed a law on the "right to oblivion"

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on the "right to oblivion," which allows users to demand the removal of links to inaccurate or irrelevant information from search results, it is reported^[10] on the Kremlin website. The document will enter into force on January 1, 2016.

The document allows citizens to demand the removal from the issuance of search engines of links to information that they consider unreliable or irrelevant (including, this applies to data on penalties for criminal offenses, if the statute of limitations of the offense has been issued) for themselves. The search engines themselves are responsible for determining the reliability and relevance of information.

To use the law, a citizen must send an official statement to the search engine indicating his personal data and links that he wants to exclude from the issuance (information on the link must concern only the applicant himself). Within 10 days, the search engine makes a decision or asks the applicant for additional data.

If the search engine refuses to delete the information, a citizen can sue him at his place of residence - in this case, the Internet company will have to send its representatives to the court.

It should be noted that the history of the adoption of the law is quite rapid: the first reading took place on June 16, 2015, the third on July 3. At the same time, in between, significant amendments were adopted to the law, lobbied by representatives of Internet companies.

The essence of the law is that from now search engines operators are obliged to stop issuing inaccurate information about individuals. At the same time, a written requirement of an individual must be a prerequisite for termination of issuance. It should be noted that after the first reading, the text of the bill was significantly softened.

Thus, the deadline for consideration of applications for the publication of false information was extended to ten working days (originally planned for three days). The mandatory requirement to specify the url of the page in the application has been clarified. In addition, it is necessary to delete information at requests under three years of age and containing the name and surname of a person.

The State Duma approved a fine for search engines in a million rubles

The State Duma adopted in December 2015 in the third reading a law that allows you to fine search engines for a million rubles for refusing to delete information at the request of a person. By the third reading, the amount of the maximum fine was reduced from three million rubles to one.

In accordance with the document, search engines will be obliged to delete inaccurate information, as well as truthful information about events that occurred over three years ago. An exception was made only for information about criminal cases.

Search engines will be fined 80-100 thousand rubles if they ignore the person's appeal. If he achieves the right to delete information through the court, then a fine of 800 thousand to a million rubles is imposed for ignoring the court decision.

Yandex refused to satisfy 73% of requests for the right to oblivion

After the entry into force of the so-called "law on oblivion," Yandex received more than 3,600 requests from 1,348 people (data as of March 2016). At the same time, most of the requests (51%) contained requirements to remove reliable but irrelevant information, as well as inaccurate information (30%). To a lesser extent, users were interested in disseminating information in violation of the law and information about extinguished convictions.

Of the total number of requests, the main Russian search engine satisfied only 27%, the remaining 73% it refused to satisfy, or partially satisfied (this is 9% of the indicated 73% of rejected requests).

"The high proportion of refusals is due to the fact that often Yandex cannot verify whether the information is reliable or not, violates its distribution of someone's rights or any laws. We warned about this at the stage of discussion of the bill: the law assigns to search engines the functions of courts or law enforcement agencies that are not characteristic of them. This problem is especially noticeable when working with requests to remove links to illegal and inaccurate information, "the representatives of the search engine comment on the statistics

.

For example, the company received appeals from doctors to remove negative reviews of their work, allegedly because of their irrelevance. But in this case, when looking for reviews about a particular doctor, a person will see only positive reviews and will not be able to add up a full-fledged picture of the specialist's activities for himself. In this case, we are talking about socially significant information, because people trust doctors in their lives and health. And it would be wrong to delete it.

Given this practice, Yandex proposes to amend the "law on oblivion": it is necessary to exclude the possibility of requiring the removal of links to inaccurate or illegal information from search results without the decision of the competent authorities; add a criterion of public importance when considering requests to delete irrelevant information; provide search engines with the right to independently determine the form of calls to them.

Yandex notes that so far this is not a complete list of improvements that, in their opinion, this law needs. The company intends to submit the remaining proposals for discussion as the practice is further formed. "So far, no trial has taken place under this law and it is difficult to predict how judges will work with it. As soon as we have enough information accumulated, we will be able to propose comprehensive amendments to the law, taking into account the experience of its application, "Yandex says.

A neurologist from Samara demanded 1 million rubles from Yandex for refusing to delete information about himself

For refusing to remove information about himself, a neurologist from Samara filed a lawsuit against Yandex demanding compensation in the amount of 1 million rubles. Earlier, the doctor sent a letter to the company with a request to remove irrelevant information about him, but he was denied the request. Yandex employees did not consider it to comply with the law on personal data, RIA Novosti reports, citing court spokeswoman Olga Myshelova.

The physician demands that the company's refusal to remove links to his personal data (last name, first name, patronymic, address of the company belonging to him and a message that he is an individual entrepreneur) be declared illegal. According to the plaintiff, one part of the information has lost its relevance to date, and the other is personal and not subject to disclosure. The neurologist explains such a high amount of compensation by the fact that the published information harms his personal life and career.

'Right to be forgotten'law will try to change

"The Sova Information and Analytical Center filed a lawsuit against Google in the Moscow Arbitration Court in the summer of 2016, follows from the file cabinet of the arbitration court. The interests of the company in court will be represented by the lawyers of Roskomsvoboda, Sarkis Darbinyan, head of the legal practice of Roskomsvoboda, told Vedomosti. In court, lawyers will demand to return these links to search results, since the articles themselves contain socially important information, and will also demand to challenge some of the norms of the law "right to forget," says Darbinyan^[11].

Russian citizens have the right to demand from search engines to remove links with inaccurate or irrelevant information from search results since the beginning of 2016. This became possible thanks to the law "on oblivion" adopted by the State Duma. The refusal of the search engine to remove links citizens can challenge in the courts of general jurisdiction. If the court considers the refusal unlawful, and the search engine refuses to comply with the court decision, it will face a fine of up to 1 million rubles.

In March 2016, the Owl Center received two notifications from Google to remove links to two pages of the organization's website from search results. We are talking about the articles of 2006 "Skinheads who beat an Angolan were convicted in Obninsk" and the article of 2008 "In Obninsk, the conviction of eight nationalists who distributed videos of neo-Nazi attacks on the Internet came into force."

The law does not work, applicants have to go to court

Regarding the law "On the right to oblivion" adopted in 2015, the lawyer of the Ilyashev & Partners bureau Dmitry Konstantinov said in March 2018 that, in fact, it did not work. The law allows citizens to demand that search engines remove information from search results that is unreliable or has become irrelevant for them. However, in fact, search engines refuse to fulfill such requirements, and the applicants have to go to court.

Criticism of the bill

Nikiforov: The law on oblivion needs to be finalized

Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolai Nikiforov spoke^[12] in June 2015 with RBC about oblivion, regulation of Yandex and disconnection of the Runet from the world network:

The Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications sent its feedback on this bill to the government. We also believe that [the law on oblivion] will not be able to fully work in conditions when companies without verification - without checking who turned to them - and, most likely, without checking the court will be ordered to perform all these actions. Today, legislation provides for a procedure for protecting honor and dignity - this happens through the courts, many use it. If the so-called law on oblivion really goes in such a version that all this will happen manually at the company level, then this is unlikely to be an effective procedure. Nevertheless, the law was adopted in the first reading. It is gratifying that there is a dialogue at the level of the relevant State Duma committee. It seems to me that we need to wait for the discussion to end, it's good that it is. Today, after all, we have created this mechanism, within the framework of which any initiative that concerns the Internet, in any case, is being discussed with companies.

The Legal Department of the State Duma considered the clauses of the "Law on Oblivion" unconstitutional

The parliamentary body checking the compliance of bills with the Constitution and other legislation criticized the norms of the "Law on Oblivion" adopted unanimously in the first reading. So the Legal Department believes that the search engine should not determine the reliability of information posted online. The conclusion (full text,.doc format) was signed by the head of the Legal Department of the State Duma M.V^[13] the^[14].

We believe that the establishment of the fact that the information disseminated on the Internet is reliable or not is within the competence of the court, and not the operator of the search engine, and should be carried out as part of a lawsuit against the person directly disseminating such information.

The first reading of the bill imposes an obligation to check the accuracy of information online on Internet sites with a search form (the first reading does not separate search engines and any other types of sites and obliges the Internet as a whole).

The norm on verification of information about crimes was similarly criticized:

The qualification of events as containing or not containing signs of criminal offenses, the terms of criminal prosecution for which have not expired, as well as the determination of whether a criminal record has been removed from a citizen or not, also fall within the competence of the court or law enforcement agencies.

The Legal Department does not believe that cleaning online is appropriate if the person interested in the removal "has lost interest in information posted online":

In our opinion, if the information has become irrelevant to the applicant, it does not mean that it has become irrelevant to others and the society as a whole, and therefore an attempt to restrict the free dissemination of such information may result in a violation of the constitutional rights of others to freely seek, receive, transmit, produce and disseminate information in any lawful way.

Yandex against

Russian Internet companies are categorically against the approval of the document in its current form. In their opinion, it contains clear contradictions to the current Russian legislation. According to Manzhikov Ochir, director of public relations at Yandex, the bill unreasonably and disproportionately limits the rights of citizens to search for information and access to it, enshrined in Article 29 of the Constitution. Manjikov points out that the document proposes to transfer the functions of courts or law enforcement agencies to commercial organizations - search engines, introduces a clear imbalance between private and public interests and does not take into account the principles of search engines and technical features of the development of the Internet.

"The bill will make it difficult or impossible to find important and reliable information, say, it may be impossible to find information and feedback about the doctor to whom you are going to go to the appointment, or about the kindergarten teacher to whom you are going to give your child," Yandex warns. - In addition, the proposed mechanism opens up opportunities for numerous abuses. No justification or confirmation is required from the authors of the complaint. As a result, links to an indefinite range of resources should disappear from the search engine. This is very convenient for achieving a wide variety of goals, for example, to hide information about fraudulent schemes or make it difficult for competitors. "

Mail.ru Group: Search engines are assigned duties that they cannot fulfill

Anton Malginov, Head of the Legal Department of VK (formerly Mail.ru Group)^[15]

Excessively wide range of information to delete

The bill provides for the obligation to remove references to reliable information related to a particular person, even disseminated in accordance with the law, more than three years ago. Almost any events in the socio-political, cultural, economic or other spheres are somehow connected with information about specific people. At the same time, the requirement to remove references to reliable and legally disseminated information is not due to any other criteria regarding information (for example, negative nature for the applicant and the lack of its significance for other persons, and so on).

In addition, the bill will allow removing links to accessible and legally created registers and databases, the media, which in practice can also lead to restrictions on the free circulation of information in general.

Assigning a control function to the search engine operator

The search engine operator is not the owner of the information referenced by the search engine. Therefore, the operator of the search engine does not have and cannot have information, necessary knowledge or authority to establish actual and other circumstances that will allow him to draw conclusions about the validity or invalidity of the information declared by the citizen, the actual period of events that occurred, compliance with the requirements of the law when posting this or that information.

Assigning the operator of the search engine the obligation to qualify information in accordance with the categories indicated in the bill essentially gives the operator control functions over the circulation of information, for the implementation of which the operator does not have the necessary tools or powers.

Moreover, in this part, the functions of state executive and judicial bodies are replaced by the discretionary powers of private (as a rule), including foreign, search engines operators.

No URL required

The wording of the law provides for the termination of the issuance of links to information, and not to specific sites or pages. From a practical point of view, this means that the search engine technically must learn to determine information that cannot be referenced, find such information on the Internet, block the issuance of all links to all discovered resources, and regularly update not only the search index, but also the index of information that cannot be referenced.

The bill does not provide for the applicant's obligation to specify the specific address (URL) of the page, which contains information that is not subject to issuance. At the same time, the current operating algorithms require specifically specifying a specific URL to exclude it from search results.

Search Engine Definition

It is not clear from the definition of a "search engine" whether such a definition applies to search engines within individual resources or individual sites (for example, site search, mail search, social network search, and others). The definition requires clarification to exclude such a special type of search as searching for a resource by site, searching in the mail, searching on a social network, and so on.

RAEC: The bill limits the constitutional right to search

The Electronic Communications Association RAEC (), which unites some Russian IT companies (,,, and Rambler VK (formerly Mail.ru Group) ivi.ru Ozon other grandees of the Russian industry), also announced its official position on the so-called "right to oblivion," which may soon begin to operate in. The Russia association divided its proposals and comments into five points, commenting on individual theses of the bill.

According to RAEC, the bill under discussion itself significantly limits the constitutional right to search for and receive information in any legal way. They did not like the associations and methods that lawmakers developed to implement the "right to oblivion." One of the main complaints relates to the procedure for removing "objectionable" links. Now the procedure obliges search engine operators to stop issuing links about a citizen, and the links themselves do not have to be given. RAEC members believe that, thus, search engines will be entrusted with the functions of state and judicial bodies, since they will have to independently determine which information refers to the applicant and which does not. In addition, it will be necessary to determine the date of the occurrence of the event and whether the discussed event has signs of a criminal offense. On top of all this, you will also have to search for links related to the event, which will take up a lot of resources, and besides, it will not lead to the deletion of the information itself.

Another part of the claims is related more to the economy. The bill does not take into account that the search, verification and removal of links requires funds, the source of which is not specified in the project. However, based on the text of the project, the source of such funds should be the search engine operator. Finally, the project provides for the possibility of filing an application with the court against the operator of the search engine at the place of residence of the plaintiff. Given the size of the country, this will lead to the need to spend significantly more money on the operator to defend his position, not to mention the fact that this initiative contradicts Article 28 of the Civil Procedure Code of the Russian Federation.

The association is not going to stop there and plans to further collect and systematize the sectoral opinion on the "right to oblivion" by sending the final document with amendments to the relevant State Duma committee.

Lawyers against

Comments on the document were also expressed by the legal department of the State Duma. The response to the bill of the head of the department, Mikhail Demenkov, says that the current legislation does not impose any restrictions on the dissemination of information depending on the statute of limitations. To combat the dissemination of inaccurate information, it should be used to delete it or terminate access to it in accordance with the procedure established by the Law "On Information," and not restrict search results.

Finally, the bill imposes on search engines unusual functions for determining the reliability of information, as well as searching for signs of a criminal offense in it. Such questions should be decided by the court, and the claim should not be filed with the search engine, but with the owners of the sites on which the relevant information is posted, Demenkov writes.

Lurkomorje: The bill is bad, nightmarish, ridiculous, ill-conceived, idiotic, harmful

The founder of the Internet encyclopedia "Lurkomorye" David Khomak^[16]

We are already tired of selecting epithets for new laws - bad, nightmarish, ridiculous, ill-conceived, idiotic, harmful. What's the odds. This law is another step towards ensuring that only information authorized by the authorities remains on the Russian Internet, and no other would remain.

Moreover, if someone really would like to protect the personal data of Russian users, we must start with an educational program. Russian Internet users do not suspect that they have any rights - and these rights were fully protected even before the current convulsive lawmaking.

Even if this bill is not passed, pieces of it will somehow leak into the laws with other amendments. It is painfully convenient to sue at the place of residence, and even more so directly from the offices of Roskomnadzor.

If this law is adopted, then the recent past from the Russian Internet will simply disappear. Moreover, the first in line will be just celebrities and other deputies. "There is no more dirt." And there will be no special Internet either.

Medusa: What's the "right to be forgotten"?

This is a person's right to require search services to remove links to pages with his personal data from the issue. Such a right for the Europeans a year ago was secured by the court of the European Union. Case was like this: the person paid off the debt, but at the request of his name, a link to the article popped up on Google, where he was called a debtor. The newspaper refused to delete the information, as at the time of publication everything was so. Then the court ordered the administration of the search engine to remove the link to this article from the issue. After that, EU citizens began to contact Google and other search engines with similar requirements, and the companies satisfied some of them, focusing on the decision of the EU court. Now the EU is developing a special law on data protection, which, in particular, will stipulate the right to oblivion^[17]

It turns out that EU citizens can remove links to any pages mentioning their name?

No. Both the decision of the European court and the draft relevant law clearly state that decisions to remove references from extradition must take into account the balance between private and public interests. It is one thing when a person is a victim of rape and does not want people to know about it, another thing is when, say, a politician tries to clean up his reputation before the election.

How much is the right to oblivion in demand in Europe?

In demand. Over the year, only Google received 270 thousand requests to remove almost a million links from the issue. The company considered most of the applications, of which more than 40% satisfied. 05

Is "the right to be forgotten" good or bad?

Hard to say. Some say that the right to oblivion protects people's personal lives, others worry about freedom of speech and people's right to access information. In the Russian case, they criticize not only the idea itself, but also the implementation. Representatives of search engines and experts say that the law is very poorly written and threatens with constant abuse.

What is the essence of Russian law?

Each person has the right to demand that the search engine remove links to the pages in question from the issue. There are three reasons for this: the information is unreliable; information is irrelevant (about events three years ago or even earlier); information is against the laws.

How do I require a search engine to stop issuing links?

You just need to write a statement and send it to the company. Probably, if the law is passed, all search engines will be obliged to create a special form for such applications. The applicant must indicate what kind of information he considers unreliable, irrelevant or contrary to the laws. A person can indicate the name or link to a site where information unpleasant for him is contained. Also, you need to enter your passport data in the application and sign a permit for their processing. There should also be a clause in the text "basis for stopping the issuance of search engine links." It is not yet clear whether this paragraph will have to prove in detail that certain information is unreliable, outdated or illegal.

Who will decide whether the information is reliable or not?

At the first stage - the search engines themselves. The largest Russian search engine Yandex, which very harshly criticized the bill, named the following among other claims: it is not clear why the authorities decided to empower commercial companies with the functions of state bodies. If the company refuses to remove the links, and the case goes to court, then the court will determine the reliability and relevance of the information.

Can you achieve the removal of any unreliable and outdated links about yourself?

No. If the information on the link is unreliable, the law allows you to seek removal from issuance without any reservations. As for outdated information, there are exceptions: it is impossible to require the removal of links to pages containing signs of criminal offenses if the deadlines for prosecution have not expired. Apparently, this should be understood as follows: if someone wrote that you stole a million from the budget, the company will not remove links to the page until you prove the falsity of the accusations. How this will work in practice is unknown. If you are convicted under an article and your criminal record has not been removed or extinguished, the search engine will also refuse to remove links to this information. Unlike the European one, the Russian bill does not spell out the need to take into account the balance of private and public interests. This means that politicians and officials will be able to get search engines to remove links to outdated but reliable information. Let's say the deputy owned a huge castle, but sold it - three years after the deal, he can ask search engines to "forget" about it.

Can a search engine refuse to remove links from the output?

No. If the search engine simply ignores the application, the company will be fined 100 thousand rubles. Employees of the company must explain their refusal. And in this case, the applicant can go to court. If the company refuses to comply with the court decision, it faces a larger fine - three million rubles. Yandex is afraid that due to fines it will be easier for companies to agree with the user's requirements than to spend time and resources on the proceedings.

Will someone be able to find out that a person asked to delete some links about himself?

Yes, but not always. Search engines will be banned from disclosing this information. But if the case comes to court, the session and materials (in the general case) will be open.

Can any search engines be required?

No. You can demand to remove the issuance from Russian search engines and foreign ones that are engaged in commerce in Russia. There is an exception: the law does not apply to national information systems. It is not completely clear what this means - perhaps we are talking about databases that take into account the debts of citizens (for example, the base of the federal bailiff service). In general, the definition of a "search engine" in the bill is so vague that any site with an archive search function can fall under it.

And if the search engine fulfills the requirement, will not find pages with information that is unpleasant to me?

If they want, they will find it. It's just going to be harder. Pages will not be included in the search engine output if you write your first and last name in the search column. But direct links can be distributed in other ways. In addition, the link can be found through search engines that the user did not contact with a request to remove the links.

And can you force the site to delete the very information about a person?

Yes, Russian citizens have such a right - but only by a court decision. Let's say on some forum they wrote that you are a fraudster. You apply to the court with a claim for the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation (Article 152 of the Civil Code). If the court decides the case in your favor, the owners of the forum may be obliged to delete the text and publish a refutation. The law on the "right to forget" does not allow the removal of information, but makes it difficult to find it without any trial.

Notes