Your name in a court ruling anyone can find
A lawsuit with a former business partner, a traffic fine, an administrative penalty or a notification that never reached your home and ended up published as a public notice. These are procedures that ended long ago, but a quick search for your name on Google finds them, sometimes on the first page.
The problem is not usually the official document itself, but the fact that it can be found by searching your name and that other websites copy it and keep it for years. It happens to many foreigners who once owned property, a car or a business in Spain: Spanish authorities publish notices in gazettes when they cannot reach someone at their address.
Where it usually appears
- Regional and provincial official gazettes: penalties, proceedings, auctions, public exams and notifications published as public notices.
- Legal websites and case law databases that publish full court rulings, sometimes without anonymisation or with incomplete anonymisation.
- Aggregators and directories that copy gazette content and index it by name.
- Forums and blogs that link to or quote the decision.
The routes we use
- Anonymisation or erasure by the website. We ask the legal website or aggregator to replace your name with initials or to remove the document, exercising your rights to erasure and to object (Articles 17 and 21 of the GDPR). A court ruling can stay published for legal information purposes without the parties needing to be identified.
- Delisting by name. Even if the document stays where it is, Google and Bing can be asked not to show it when your name is searched, under Article 93 of the Spanish Data Protection Act (LOPDGDD). More details on our right to be forgotten page.
- Request to the gazette. The gazette does not delete what it has published, but many public authorities agree to mark a page so that search engines do not index it, especially when time has passed and the publication has served its purpose.
If there is no reply within a reasonable time, or the reply is a refusal with no arguments, we file a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD).
A detail that helps
If the penalty was cancelled, the proceedings were dropped or the debt was paid, keep the document that proves it. It is the strongest argument for asking that it stop being shown.
What can and cannot be achieved
The usual result is that the document stops appearing when your name is searched and that copies on private websites are anonymised or disappear. What cannot be done is to delete an official publication from the gazette's archive: it is part of the public record. It is also harder when the decision is very recent or relates to your current public activity, for example as an elected official. In that case we will tell you before we start.
How we work
- We search for your name on search engines, gazettes and legal databases.
- We show you what we found and which route applies to each result.
- We draft and send the requests on your behalf, with the documents in your case.
- We follow up and send you a final report with screenshots.
If you want to know what appears today under your name and what can be done, request the free analysis.