Plastic Surgeon and Net's Memory Figure in Google Face-Off in Spain

In 1991, the Spanish newspaper El País published an article centered on a dispute between Madrid plastic surgeon Hugo Guidotti Russo and one of his patients over an allegedly botched breast surgery. The headline: "The Risk of Wanting to Be Slim." Nearly 20 years later, Dr. Guidotti Russo, backed by Spain's privacy regulator, contends that the tale of the dispute is personal information and wants to purge the article from Google, where it shows up on the first page of results when his name is searched. His complaint accounts for one of about 80 instances in which the Spanish regulator has told U.S.-based Google Inc. to remove personal information about individuals from its search results. Google says it plans to challenge most of those orders, arguing that the agency is overstepping its authority.