Google reviews 1.2 million right to be forgotten requests in Europe

Google has in all received 348, 508 requests from individuals.

Google has evaluated more than 1.2 million websites for potential removal from its search engine since a court in Europe ruled a year ago that European Union citizens have the right to delete personal information from the Internet.

While Kaufer has this to say: “it’s clear that Google continues to seek ways to manipulate its search results to benefit Google’s own interests”.

Similarly, Google agreed to remove a report of a guilty verdict against an individual for a crime considered “spent” under United Kingdom law – where it happened so long ago that the person is no longer required to declare it when asked if they have any criminal convictions. This move looks like a strategy to block out or get ahead of their competitors and is the complete opposite of what Google’s position on search. Of the total URLs requested for removal, these sites account for 9%.

Google is assessing nearly 10,000 privacy requests from Sweden.

The U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office ordered Google in August to remove links to articles that described URLs it had removed.

France: A priest convicted for possession of child sexual abuse imagery asked Google to remove articles reporting on his sentence and banishment from the church. During the antitrust cases, Google has been seen arguing that their search products are driven by their consumers’ needs and not driven by competition as claimed by their accusers.

United Kingdom: A man asked that we remove a link to a news summary of a local magistrate’s decisions that included the man’s guilty verdict. The chief executive of Gogobot, another local search company, noted that a bug was unlikely to be behind the results, as both his company and Foursquare were unaffected.

The top 10 sites Google removed links from represent nine percent of all the requests it received.

It is worth pointing out that the social networking giant Facebook was the top site where users wanted information to be scrubbed from search results.

Stoppelman expressed doubt that the search issues affecting Yelp were caused by a bug and suggested that Google was targeting the company.

The search engine can decide whether to scrub the results or not based on the circumstances.

The European Internet users have made this request after the EU court granted them the “right to be forgotten” last May.