GOOGLE RECEIVED 2.4M ‘RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN’ REQUESTS SO FAR
Europe introduced a “right to be
forgotten” law back in May 2014, allowing users to ask search engines to remove
personal information about them that’s no longer relevant or current. Since
then, Google has received more than 2.4 million such requests
to remove data from its results, the company revealed in its latest transparency
report. Google has not honored all of the requests it received, but it did
comply with 43.3-percent of them. In a bid to expand its right to be forgotten
transparency reports, Google also notes that it will start adding more data
from the past two years, since its reviewers began to manually annotate URL
submissions back in January 2016.
The new information will further detail a breakdown of
the requests received from private users, as well as non-private users such as
companies or government officials. Google will also detail the contents of
takedown requests, associated websites, and delisting rates, i.e. the rates at
which it removes content when asked. Among various reasons for filing right to be forgotten requests, the most common one amounting to
24-percent of cases pertains to “professional information.” “Self-authored”
follows with ten-percent, crime accounts for eight-percent, while “professional
wrongdoing” makes up seven-percent of the submissions. For the sake of
transparency, Google further provided examples of takedown notices it received,
as well as their context and eventual outcomes.
Detailing the nature of the right to be
forgotten requests it has received so far, Google notes that roughly a third of
all requests were tied to directory services and social media. Other requests
were related to legal history information found either in news articles
(18-percent) or on government websites (three-percent). Google complies with
the right to be forgotten requests if the information requiring delisting is
inaccurate, irrelevant, inadequate, or excessive. If the information would
serve a public interest by being available in search results, the company may
not comply with a takedown request. Google is issuing transparency reports to explain how it decides whether to comply with
a request or not, and how users are exercising their right to be forgotten.
According to Google’s latest report, private individuals accounted for
89-percent of all right to be forgotten requests filed from mid-2014 until the
turn of this year.
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