Out of the quarter of a million right to be forgotten removal requests Google has received in a year, the search engine says it has approved only a little more than 40 percent of them.
Coming right before the first anniversary of the European Union's Court of Justice ruling that Google is responsible for removing "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive" search engine links to information about European citizens, Google has published its first transparency report detailing how far it has gone in upholding the European court's declaration.
Google says it has received a total of 254,271 requests from individuals asking to take down 922,638 links to information about themselves. Of the nearly 1 million links requested for removal, Google has removed only 41.3 percent of them. Most of the requests come from France, Germany, the UK, Spain, and Italy, and the websites most affected include Facebook, the New Zealand social network search engine Profile Engine, and Google Groups.
Google does not specify how it decides whether to approve or reject a request, but the examples given in its transparency report reveal it typically approves requests from victims of crimes or persons accused of crimes that were absolved. Individuals with criminal records and public officials often have their requests to remove links to records of their crimes denied.
For instance, Google says a high-ranking public official in Hungary requested to have links to articles about a decades-old crime removed. Google did not remove the links. In the UK, a media professional asked to have links to reports about embarrassing content he posted online, a request that Google did not approve.
On the other hand, Google approved the request of a rape victim in Germany who asked to have links to news articles about the incident removed. In some instances, Google has agreed to remove certain links while keeping other links. For example, a doctor requested to have removed more than 50 links to articles about a botched procedure. While Google rejected the doctor's request to remove reports about the incident, it agreed to take down links containing the doctor's personal information and did not contain information about the procedure.
The EU's decision to order Google to decide whether a link should be published or not remains controversial, even a year after the decision was made. Google itself is wary of having to carry the burden of deciding what information to censor from its search engine, as are content creators who prefer to leave the matter in the hands of the legal system instead of a private company.
Also an issue is whether Google must remove requested links in all countries, as it is what the EU contends, or it must limit the removal of links only on the European versions of its search engine.
