MORE THAN 1,440 requests to remove certain search results from Google were made by people in Ireland since May.
Publishing its transparency report today, 4,175 URLs were evaluated by Google as part of the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling and of those, 1,014 (29.8%) were removed from its search engine.
Across Europe, 144,907 requests were made with 497,507 URLs evaluated throughout the process. Of those requests, 170,506 URLs were removed in total.
Of those sites affected by the removals, Facebook, profileengine.com (a site allowing you to search for people online), YouTube, badoo.com (a social network similar to Tinder) and Google Groups saw the most URLs removed.
The ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling came from European Court of Justice ruling which stated that a person could request certain information to be removed if “the data appear to be inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.”
After Google set up an online form for requests, it received more than 12,000 requests on the first day alone, which increased to 41,000 in the first four days.
The removal of search results only applies to those queries relating to an individual’s name. If a request is approved, it means the article or page relating to that person does not appear for any search results using the person’s name (eg: John Smith Dublin court case), but will show it in a general query (eg: Dublin court case).
Webmasters are notified whenever a link relating to their site is removed from its search engine, and says it’s “working to create a channel for webmasteres to request that we re-review a decision.” If an individual doesn’t agree with a removal, it can request that a local data protection authority review Google’s decision.
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