In May 2014, a top EU court ruled that Google must amend search results to remove links to pages that contain irrelevant or outdated information about a person if a removal request is submitted. The ruling is now commonly known as the ‘right to be forgotten’.
Google has confirmed that since May 2014 it has removed nearly half a million links and recently released data showing exactly where these requests came from:
- France: 17,500 requests
- Germany: 16,500 requests
- UK: 12,000 requests
- Spain: 8,000 requests
- Italy: 7,500 requests
- Netherlands: 5,500 requests
Following the ruling in May, the only response from Google was to say it felt the decision was “disappointing”. Given the resources that are required to assess and action requests individually, it’s hardly surprising the search giant wasn’t over the moon with the result.
Google are certainly not alone in their disappointment, Wikipedia has vowed to “fight censorship” following the ruling and Forbes published an online article entitled Five Reasons Not to Invoke Your Right to Be Forgotten.
While the ruling has sparked heated debates around privacy issues and censorship, it certainly hasn’t stopped the avalanche of requests and it seems that Google faces real difficulty in handling the sheer volume of applications:
“Since this ruling was published on 13 May 2014, we’ve been working around the clock to comply. This is a complicated process because we need to assess each individual request and balance the rights of the individual to control his or her personal data with the public’s right to know and distribute information.”
This laborious task hasn’t been made any easier by an apparent lack of understanding around the criteria that a request must meet in order to be successful. Of course, this has meant there have been a lot of requests submitted that, quite frankly, never stood a chance. A few choice examples:
- A doctor requesting that poor reviews about his behaviour be removed
- An actor wanting articles about his/her affair with a teenager to be removed
- A person that attempted to murder his/her family requested that articles containing information about the incident be scrubbed from the search results
Therefore, it’s unsurprising to learn Google has only accepted around 35 per cent of the requests it has reviewed from the UK, leaving many people disappointed
Ironically, the man who started all of this, Mario Costeja Gonzalez, still hasn’t managed to get the link he wanted removed to be taken out of the search results.
The Spanish Authorities originally rejected his request to have the link taken down which led to the appeal in the EU court. While Mario’s appeal led to the final ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling, the whole situation has now made the link relevant and, therefore, unsuitable for removal.
Unfortunately for Mario, even if the link was removed, there are now a whole host of new articles that display the content that he had wanted to hide. It doesn’t look likely that Mario Costeja Gonzalez will be allowed to forget his past any time soon