Google’s report on removals pursuant to the “right to be forgotten” – some interesting points

Google issued its report on the requests for removal pursuant to the  “right to be forgotten”. Period considered: May 29, 2014 to current.

Here are some interesting points: Google received almost 200,000 requests “to be forgotten”, evaluated almost 700,000 urls and removed the 59.8% of urls.

French are those who requested to be forgotten the most (37,990 requests), which is roughly fifteen per cent of the total requests), followed by Germans, British, Spanish and Italians (the latter “only” 14,519 requests). Germans seem to be the most successful among the top five “requesters”: 49.7% of urls were removed. Very little successful were the Italians, whose “requested urls” were removed only 25.3%.  The general relationship between removal and non removal is 40.2% vs. 59.8%

The urls that were most impacted by the removals are www.facebook.com (URLs removed: 4789) and profileengine.com (URLs removed: 4527).

Google reported some examples of requests (some satisfied and some not satisfied):

Example of a successful request: “A woman requested that we remove a decades-old article about her husband’s murder, which included her name. We have removed the page from search results for her name”

Example of an unsuccessful request: “We received a request from an individual to remove over 50 links to articles and blog posts reporting on public outcry over accusations that he was abusing welfare services. We did not remove the pages from search results.”

See the report here

 

For information: Francesca Giannoni-Crystal