Google has removed over 440000 links over Europeans’ ‘right to be forgotten

In a recent ruling related to “right to be forgotten”, a European authority asked the search engines to remove the listings from their search results even outside the European Union.

Google’s given us fresh insight into the links it’s been forced to remove from search results in response to Europeans’ court-ordered right to be forgotten. We did not remove the pages from search results.

To date, it has received 348,085 requests and evaluated more than 1.2 million links for removal. Media reports suggest it takes around 15-20 days for Google to process an application, which it says undergoes a full review by lawyers and engineers.

The company says that Facebook is once again at the top of the list of URLs requested for removal.

According to the legal complaint, there were a lot of users sold out over the course of the deal: “over 400 million profiles were aggregated, along with over 15 billion “friendship” connections between people and 3 billion “likes”. Individuals could ask Google, Microsoft and other search engines to remove the pages from their search results.

When links are removed from its index, Google notifies the websites that are affected, but those sites are not required to remove content.

Google received 73,399 requests from France, 60,198 from Germany, 43,101 from United Kingdom, 33,106 requests from Spain and 26,186 requests from Italy. It scrubbed 41 percent of them.

A Google outline of scenarios leading to information being forgotten in searches included pages with content exclusively about someone’s health, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Other common delisting criteria included criminal convictions regarding children or stories focusing on criminal charges that were subsequently overturned by courts.

“We may decline to delist if we determined that the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest”, Google said in an online post. The company maintained the articles were in the public’s interest. In 58 percent of the requests, Google has removed the URLs from its search engine.

Google Groups, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter also feature on the list with a few thousand removed links each. And while the examples help define what it will and won’t remove, the internet at large not just Google still hasn’t decided what constitutes public and private life online.