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Google reveals more than 6,000 Brits have requested information be removed under EU 'right to be forgotten' legislation

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By Gillian West, Social media manager

October 12, 2014 | 2 min read

Google has revealed that Britons have made 18,304 requests to remove links to more than 60,000 websites using the EU's 'right to be forgotten'.

More than 6,000 people from the UK have asked for information about their past be taken down by the search engine giant and across Europe Google has received close to half a million requests to remove links and so far has taken down 170,000 search results.

"We believe it's important to be transparent about how much information we're removing from search result while being respectful of individuals who have made requests," explained James Hemerly, public policy manager for Google in a blog post.

"We've received the most removal requests from France, Germany, the UK, Spain, and Italy respectively," Hemerly said.

The blog post also revealed data in about the domains that appear most frequently in URLs asked to be removed. Among the top 10 domains are Facebook, Badoo, YouTube and Google Groups.

The 'right to be forgotten' legislation allows European citizens to request Google remove links that are 'inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant' from search results. Within a month of the ruling more than 12,000 people across Europe completed Google's request form and at one point Google said it was getting 20 requests per minute.

In addition to revealing the number of requests made and domains Google has also provided a list of anonymous examples of requests received including a UK doctor who had botched a procedure and financial professionals requesting links to reports on their arrests and convictions for financial crimes be removed.

All in all 144,000 requests have been made to remove links to 497,000 web pages since the online request form went live on May 29.

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