We have the impression -and I believe it is a correct impression- that our privacy and image are today more vulnerable than ever. Google argues in the National Court that it would proceed to a subject of censorship if it were forced, at the request of a person and through the action of the Agency for the Protection of data, to remove from its search engine the references to certain personal data of theirs. Google's correlation between censorship and privacy protection does not seem reasonable.

No one is unaware that the mega search engine has created a new habit among Internet users: that of researching anyone and everyone. If you are going to hire someone, if you find an interesting subject , if... it is very likely that you type his or her name in the search engine to see what comes out of him or her on the screen.

But it is not a googlelistic activity that is above suspicion. For two reasons: 1. Google is a cumulative storeroom of personal data from blogs, websites, emails, online publications and other sources, with the peculiarity that the personal data that appear there - and that are swept by the search engine - have been placed in one way or another on the Internet by third parties, without the consent of the person concerned. Cumulative means cumulative, i.e.: Google is characterized by adding and adding data to the voice of the name typed in its search page.

And 2. Google does not cancel these data. For Google there is only the past, there is no future. And "bygones are bygones" nothing: the data will remain for years, many years, accessible to anyone who is curious to know something about a third party who was passing by, perhaps yourself. In Europe, a formula that has gained ground as a way to protect privacy on the Internet is to think of the object of the right to privacy as a freedom of action of each individual, who decides what to communicate, how to communicate and what not to communicate of his or her personal data . This is the so-called "right to informational self-determination".

In the same way as has happened with the right to one's own image, whose hard core is the freedom of each person to decide about the Public Communication of his own image and about its commercialization, it seems that what would be better suited to the reality of the traffic of personal data would be a protection that would act not so much as a containment wall against the interest of third parties, but as a reality modulable by the decision of each individual to communicate or keep out of the knowledge of others the own private life and other information of reference letter staff .

A judgment of the German Constitutional Court in 1983 was the starting point for this new approach by recognizing the "School of the individual to determine fundamentally for himself the knowledge dissemination and use of data concerning his person". Something that was not based on the classic right to privacy, but, above all, on "the values of freedom and human dignity in relation to the development of the personality" (...). And the Spanish Law on the Protection of Personal data of 1999, and the jurisprudence on the topic of the Spanish Constitutional Court have embraced this Philosophy of the German Court, which places individual freedom and dignity staff as the keys to democratic coexistence. That is nothing.