Google's 'right to be forgotten' stats reveal 18,000 UK requestsPolitics / 10 October 14 / by Katie Collins
The latest figures from Google show that the search giant has received
144,907 requests to remove links to 497,507 pages, following the decision by an EU court that individuals have "
the right to be forgotten".
The company's newly updated
Transparency Report includes a section detailing the impact of the European Court of Justice's ruling earlier this year that upheld the right to request to have irrelevant results about you removed from search results. All of the figures Google has provided date back to 29 May 2014. During that time Google approved nearly 60 percent of requests to have URLs removed from results.
The majority of requests have come from France, Germany, the UK, Spain and Italy, Google has revealed in a blog post. In total Google has
received over 18,000 requests from within the UK relating to over 63,000 URLs. It has agreed to honour around 65 percent of these requests, which is obviously higher than the EU average.
For the sake of transparency, Google has also chosen to reveal information about 10 top domains which have seen their URLs removed from search results Among these domains are YouTube and Google Groups -- showing that Google's own services have been very much affected by the ruling. The domain that has seen the most URLs removed is Facebook, with a total of 3,331 requests honoured by Google.
In the
updated Transparency Report, Google has also chosen to include some anonymised versions of real requests it has received, in order to shed light on what people are asking of the search engine and what decisions Google is making.
In Italy, for example, a woman requested that Google remove a decades-old article about her husband's murder that mentioned her name. One request from the UK that Google refused to comply with involved a media professional, who wanted four links to articles reporting on embarrassing content he had posted to the internet, removed.
Google seems to honour requests made by victims of crime, but perhaps comfortingly, perpetrators do not fare so well. Financial professionals from Switzerland and Italy asked the search engine to remove multiple links to pages reporting their arrests and conviction for financial crimes. Google did not adhere to these requests.
Writing
in a blog post, Google's public policy manager Jess Hermerly says the company is determined "to find ways to share even more information about about the impact of 'the right to be forgotten' in the near future".
