The right to be forgotten is the idea that everyone has the civil right to request information about themselves be removed from the internet. With the rise of search engines and the continued advancements of the internet, it has become harder and harder to suppress unsavory information about an individuals’ past. Almost any information is now just a search away.
The right to be forgotten recently surfaced in Spain in May 2014. A man who had previously gone through bankruptcy was attempting to get a newspaper article about his bankruptcy removed from the internet. He argued that since it was several years ago, there was no reason for the outdated information to be accessible to the users of the internet. The case went to the European Court of Justice, who ruled that search engines act as data controllers. As data controllers, the court determined they must consider requests to stop displaying outdated or irrelevant material in their search results. This ruling meant that search engines in the European union must begin accepting requests for certain links to be excluded from their search results.
As a result of this ruling, Google now supports receiving right to be forgotten requests. The requests are to have pages not be returned in search queries, rather than being removed from the internet in their entirety. Opponents of this new ruling say that although it supports personal privacy, it conflicts with the free flow of information that makes the internet what it is today.
This ruling has been in place since July 2014. On October 13, 2014, Google released some initial statistics on the right to be forgotten in Europe so far. Google has received 144,954 requests, which spanned 497,695 different urls. Google said that it has removed 42% of these, leaving 58% of them in search results. Google said, “In evaluating a request, we will look at whether the results include outdated or inaccurate information about the person”. This is important because it shows they will not just remove any link that is potentially damaging to a person’s reputation. Instead they take the time to evaluate whether the information is actually invalid or outdated.
In the report, Google gave a few examples of requests they have received so far. The first example was a request that was granted for a user in Germany. The user was a rape victim and when searching for her name, a newspaper article about the incident was one of the first results. The second example was a request from that was denied for a user in Switzerland. The user was a financial professional who had been arrested and convicted for several financial crimes. Google denied the request for more than 10 links to be taken down.
Complaints have surfaced that this process puts too much power in the hands of Google. As a result, individuals whose requests are denied, can appeal to data protection authorities. Google is also working to create a channel for webmasters to appeal these decisions.
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