10,000 a Day Invoke 'Right To be Forgotten'

Four weeks on from the European Court's landmark decision granting individuals a 'right to be forgotten' in search results, Google says it is receiving about 10,000 requests for removal each day; and will reportedly flag up removed items in searches, as well as reporting regularly on their total volume.

A ruling in mid-May from the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) for the first time required search engines with offices in the EU to consider requests from individuals for the removal of links to certain information about them. Individuals can now request search engines to remove links to information which they deem 'inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive...', and the companies concerned 'must then duly examine its merits'.

Google responded just over two weeks later by putting up a form for EU citizens to make such requests, and says it received around 41,000 requests in its first four days, and continues to receive about 10,000 a day. Although the number seems large, EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has pointed out that Google copes already with 'millions' of copyright removal requests, making the incremental bother of the new requirement relatively small.

A report in the Guardian newspaper this week suggests that Google will flag up entries that have been removed as a result of the ruling, in future search results, but the search giant has thus far declined to comment. The paper also suggests Google will update its biannual transparency report, which gives the number of requests by governments worldwide to remove items from its results, by adding the number of right-to-be-forgotten requests it has granted, presumably also by country.

Despite Reding's insistence that the ruling only calls to order companies who have in fact been bound all along by a law of 1995, the EU's data enforcers have accepted the need to give search engines time to comply and to work out their approach to requests. In a blog, the UK's Data Protection Director David Smith said: 'We won't be ruling on any complaints until the search providers have had a reasonable time to put their systems in place and start considering requests.'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.