Google Reveals Data About European 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests

A new report from internet giant Google revealed that it has received almost 150,000 requests from Europeans to remove half a million webpages, under the 'right to be forgotten'. Getty Images

Internet giant Google has revealed that it refuses a majority of the requests is receives from Europeans seeking to wield their recently-won 'right to be forgotten'.


Since setting up the process for deleting links from European search results in May, following a court ruling, the company revealed that it has received 145,544 requests under the act, and has evaluated almost 500,000 URLs for removal. Data shows that the company acceded to the removal in 41.8 percent of cases, and declined in 58.2 percent. This breaks down as an average of 1,000 requests per day since the process began.

The company's online transparency report showed that France was the country with the highest number of requests (29,010), followed by Germany (25,078) and then the UK (18,403).
Google cited examples of the types of requests they received and their responses. A request the company granted was described thusly: “A woman requested that we remove a decades-old article about her husband’s murder, which included her name. The page has been removed from search results for her name.”

However, the company also detailed a request it looked less favorably upon: “A financial professional asked us to remove more than 10 links to pages reporting on his arrest and conviction for financial crimes. We did not remove the pages from search results.”

The search giant also revealed that Facebook.com was the site most-affected, with Profileengine.com and YouTube.com rounding out the top three.

It is not just the content of articles to which Europeans can object. The BBC's Economics Editor Robert Peston outlined how an article he wrote about former Merrill Lynch boss Stan O'Neal was removed from results for a certain name, but that name transpired not to be Mr O'Neal's but a person who availed of the comments section beneath the article.

Matt Kallman, a Google spokesperson, told Mashable "each request is reviewed individually by a human, not an algorithm."

The European Court of Justice, or ECJ, ruled in May that search engines must remove links to “outdated or irrelevant” personal information when a European citizen requests them to do so, after a Spanish citizen brought a landmark case who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home on Google's search results infringed his privacy.

The decision has been highly controversial. Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee recently branded the law “draconian,” and several European media organizations have criticized the ruling as imposing unreasonable restrictions on press freedom.

The ruling was recently cited in Japan, where a court ordered Google to remove links about a man's relations with a criminal organization. The complainants lawyer said that the right to be forgotten had been an example to them, and that they had used some of its logic and language.

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