European ‘right to be forgotten’ requests surpass 250k
Over a quarter of a million right to be forgotten requests have been submitted to Google since the implementation of a court ruling granting European citizens the right to have links removed to outdated personal information online.
On the first anniversary of the controversial legislation Google said it has processed 253,617 such requests of which just over 40 per cent have been approved.
This is where information deemed to be ‘inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive’ is removed from search engines to minimise distress to the individual concerned.
The European Court of Justice introduced the ruling on 13 May 2014 following representations by a Spaniard wishing to purge a newspaper article covering his insolvency to be expunged from Google’s rankings.
Since then Google has been bombarded with similar such requests, including 32,076 requests in the UK alone to remove 126,571 links – of which 37.5 per cent have been approved.