Google Lists Right-to-Be-Forgotten Requests, Facebook URLs Are Often Removed

To date, it has received 348,085 requests and evaluated more than 1.2 million links for removal.

A European Court of Justice ruling in May 2014 recognizing the “right to be forgotten” on the net opened the door for Google users to ask the search engine to remove results about them that are inaccurate or no longer relevant.

Wiping the link from search engines does not remove the actual Web page from the Internet, and Google now only extends that kind of scrubbing to Europe-specific domains, but not the standard Google.com that is used in the United States.

Last Sunday, Stoppelman has even flagged down an issue with Google’s navigational search wherein even TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer has chimed in and said in a post that when one tried “Search for tripadvisor Hilton” the tripadvisor link was placed so far down the results that it could be barely seen.

According to fresh data, nearly 10,000 Swedes have lodged privacy requests with American tech giant Google for search removals but only around 41 percent have been approved.

Google has also said that most users that submit requests are coming from France followed, in order, by Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy.

Though Google has been working on the right to be forgotten requests for a year, it can be successful only if it is not based on public interest or record.

Microsoft previously disclosed that in the first half of this year it got 3,546 requests that online information be forgotten by Bing, granting half of them. In 58 percent of the requests, Google has removed the URLs from its search engine.

This latest transparency report shows the requests cover a wide range of sources.

Meanwhile, in Latvia: “A political activist who was stabbed at a protest asked us to remove a link to an article about the incident”. The number #2 spot was taken by profileengine.com, a search site for social networking and dating profiles. Top of the pile is Facebook, with other high-profile sites and services like YouTube and Twitter also listed.

Executive from the two sites, which compete with Google to offer travel and business recommendations, tweeted examples of smartphone searches over the weekend that included their company names but pointed people toward Google’s reviews and maps results. Given the company’s state of turmoil in this area, as it has historically faced online traffic-manipulating cases in other countries, such discreet practices in local searches would not be a wise move.

The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office ordered Google in August to remove links to articles that described URLs it had removed. “While the right to be forgotten may now be the law in Europe, it is not the law globally”, he continued.