Less than a week after Google published its online request form for individuals who want to have certain information about them removed from the search results; more than 40,000 requests to be forgotten have come flooding in.
To comply with a landmark ruling set by the Court of Justice of the European Union that orders Google to remove links to information about individuals that are considered inaccurate, irrelevant or outdated, Google put up a web form where people can file a request for the removal of links to information about themselves.
Google was inundated with 12,000 requests within the first 24 hours of the form's publication. It seems the numbers are not going to let up anytime soon as thousands more people are cropping up with requests to be forgotten on the Internet. Just four days after the form was published, Google has already received 41,000 forms from people all over Europe, or 10,000 requests per day or seven requests a minute.
Most of these requests came from the U.K. and Germany, with one of them coming from a man who attempted to murder his family and now wants to have a new article about the incident removed from the search pages.
The court's decision covers the removal of links from the search results, but not the removal of information from specific websites. It also states that Google and other search engines are responsible for striking a balance between protecting individuals' right to be forgotten and public interest. With the sweeping decision in place, the search engines carry the logistically complex burden of determining what kinds of information are inaccurate, irrelevant or no longer relevant. They will also have to identify what constitutes public interest, a highly subjective matter that requires human evaluators rather than machines, which might push Google to hire new staff or reorganize its existing staff to process the requests alone.
Other major search engines are also evaluating what steps to take in light of the European Union court's decision. Yahoo released a statement Tuesday that says the company is currently working on a solution that "balances the important privacy and freedom of expression interests."
However, members of U.K. Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) believe that the decision to remove links from search results should lie on the hands of the proper authorities and not on the search engines.
"Ispa has consistently argued that companies are ill-placed to make such decisions which should be made by a competent authority such as the Information Commissioner's Office and its European counterparts," says ISPA secretary-general Nicholas Lansman.
