Google Releases Info On 2.4 Million 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests (engadget.com)

According to Google's latest transparency report, the company has received 2.4 million "right to be forgotten" requests since 2014, most of which came from private individuals. Engadget reports: Europe's biggest court passed the right to be forgotten law in 2014, compelling the tech titan to remove personal info from its search engine upon request. In the report, Google has revealed that it complied with 43.3 percent of all the requests it's gotten and has also detailed the nature of those takedown pleas. France, Germany and the UK apparently generated 51 percent of all the URL delisting appeals. Overall, 89 percent of the takedown pleas came from private individuals: Non-government figures such as celebrities submitted 41,213 of the URLs in Google's pile, while politicians and government officials submitted 33,937. As Gizmodo noted, though, there's a small group of law firms and reputation management services submitting numerous pleas, suggesting the rise of reputation-fixing business in the region.

Out of those 2.4 million requests, 19.1 percent are directory URLs, while news websites and social networks only make up 17.6 and 11.6 percent of them. Majority of the URLs submitted for removal are random online destinations that don't fall under any of the previous categories. As for the takedown's reasons, it looks 18.1 percent of the submissions want their professional info scrubbed, 7.7 percent want info they previously posted online themselves to be removed and 6.1 percent want their crimes hidden from search.

Comments

Censorship house, not an information company

[RightwingNutjob]

Today they started screening out any results containing 'gun' in their shopping results. And I mean all. For a time, searching for 'Guns and roses' would turn up empty. They've "fixed" it at the time of this post.

Re:Question:

[jpaine619]

Is Google the only goddam search engine on the planet?

Why is it always, "Google, Google, Google?" Did Momma always like Google best?

Is Bing a thing?

Google 74.52%

Baidu 10.49%

Bing 7.98%

Yahoo! 5.41%

Effectively, yes.

They started out with a superior product. Unfortunately they are beginning to act like a monopolist. I'm pretty heavily conservative, but there are times when a company gathers such a large chunk of the market that maybe free-market economics aren't enough... I hate the fact that the government might have to get involved but I don't know what the solution would be in situations like this. It's not as simple as choosing a different search engine (I've done that and it's not that the others are a little worse, they are orders of magnitude shittier.

Bing sucks.. I mean they just really suck. The search returns just aren't nearly as accurate or relevant.. Like it or hate it, the search engines (Google in particular) have become the gateways to the web (for most people, like.. 90%+ probably (this is an educated guess based on my real world observations). Maybe when companies control that much information, maybe they should be subject to 1st amendment (anti-censorship) restrictions.. I dunno...

Re:IMV, a right to be forgotten.....

[tlhIngan]

.... should extend only as far as any people who might be able to find out about a past transgression, by whatever means, are willing to forgive it.

That is, if they are willing to forgive it in the first place, then it doesn't matter if they know about it... and if they weren't willing to forgive it, then demanding that records be altered or erased so that they can't find out about it in the first place amounts to unwarranted historical revisionism, and basically only wanting to avoid the natural consequences of one's past choices.

Then you need to read about the law in question.

First off, it doesn't "delete URLs". It only deletes associations with them.

So if there's a news article about you being arrested for possessing a baggie of pot 20 years ago, the right to be forgotten will let you prevent google from suggesting say "arrested" if someone typed "nerdflat" into Google. It would not prevent someone from seeing the result of "nerdflat arrest news" that shows the link (because that is factual data).

The law also demands that if it's a crime, the punishment has been paid - so if you were jailed and served your time and released, you can have Google remove that link after a reasonable period of time. News will not be deleted, so you can't delete the BBC or CNN or anyone else from reporting it, but you can prevent a casual Google of your name from showing it.

Also, some things cannot be forgotten, period.

You may ask why I detail things that happened way in the past - that's the entire point of the law. Imagine how hard it is getting a job if the first thing someone sees when they Google you is your 20 year old arrest. Not only is it entirely irrelevant, especially if you've done the time, but is something that old still relevant? Perhaps you were 16 when it happened? Is it fair that a criminal or arrest record check won't show it, but Google remembers?

That's where the right comes into play - otherwise, you're going to have a whole generation of young kids too stupid to know better fail the Google test despite having clean records, all because while the law expunges adolescent criminal history, Google and the Internet don't?

And if you think "society should forget only if they deem it OK", then let me ask you - is child pornography OK? If not, then if a teenaged couple sent nude photos of each other and get arrested, that should remain? And if those photos get sent to someone else (an offense known as distribution of child pornography), that person who was probably just innocently forwarding photos onwards to their teenaged friends now a sex predator for life? (And yes, technically, while the teen couple sending sexy photos should not be child pornography, the forwarding of said photos by third parties isn't as clear-cut).

That's why there's the law - because we all make mistakes, and once we've paid the due, and sufficient time has passed, we should be able to move on.

The problem with the law is on clear display.

[sabbede]

Here's what's wrong with the "right to be forgotten" law: "politicians and government officials submitted 33,937 [requests]". Politicians and government officials are the exact people whose pasts must remain a matter of permanent public record.