In Google's study Three years of the Right to be Forgotten, the search engine giant reports receiving delisting requests for 2,367,380 URLS of which 20% "related to news outlets and government websites that in a majority of cases covered a requester’s legal history."
A very small number of requestors, mostly reputation management agencies and lawfirms, accounted for a very large number of requests. Google refers to these as "high volume requestors": 0.25% (one fourth of one percent) of requesters "generated 14.6% of requests and 20.8% of delistings."
Google accepted 43% of delisting requests.
Today, when you perform a search in Europe, you will frequently see the message: "Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe."
It is impossible to find out who requested the removal, what (if anything) was removed or why - even when it is a search for a Nazi war criminal that produces the message.
There is no transparency. No external audit. No Freedom of Information Requests. No way to know the identity of the person or - as is frequently the case - professional Reputation Management Company that filed the request. There is no way to know the identity of the individual who decides what to remove.
When the Right to Be Forgotten, championed by European Commissionner Viviane Reding, was decided by the European Court in May of 2014, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia predicted "memory holes". This is precisely what is happening.
To find out whether your search results might be compromised, launch a search and scroll down to the bottom of the page to check.
This is clearly a story that deserves much more attention than it has received.
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Bing has removed 23,895 URLs from its search engine ( out of 62,027 URLs requested for removal) in accordance with Europe's 2014 Right To Be Forgotten.
France, the UK and Germany account for the lion's share of requests. It is not reported how many of the URLs concern news or official government sites.
