Google receives 3,48,085 ‘right to be forgotten’ requests

A report released on Wednesday by Google showed that the top country for requests was France, where the Internet giant is in a standoff with data protection officials.

A European Court of Justice ruling in May 2014 recognizing the "right to be forgotten" on the net opened the door for Google users to ask the search engine to remove results about them that are inaccurate or no longer relevant.

Google set up an online form that people in Europe can fill out to ask for information to be excluded from search results.

Similar processes have been put in place to ask to be forgotten by Microsoft's Bing search engine that also powers queries at Yahoo.

It is the Internet companies themselves who get to decide which requests to grant.

Microsoft previously disclosed that in the first half of this year it got 3,546 requests that online information be forgotten by Bing, granting half of them.

In the report released on Wednesday, Google said that right-to-be-forgotten requests have targeted slightly more than 1.23 million Internet pages (URLs), and that it agreed to remove 42 per cent of them from online search results in Europe. Some crimes vanish

France was the country with the top number of requests, accounting for 73,399 applications aimed at nearly a quarter of a million URLs, followed by Germany with 60,198 requests concerning 220,589 URLs. In both countries, about 48 per cent of the unwanted links were eliminated from Google search results, according to the report. Meanwhile, the report indicated that Google granted about 38 per cent of the 43,101 requests submitted in the United Kingdom; 37 per cent of the 33,106 requests in Spain, and just shy of 30 per cent of the 26,186 requests made in fifth-placed Italy.

Google said it complied with nearly 46 per cent of the 10,121 requests in Belgium, nearly 41 per cent of the 9,687 requests in Sweden, and about 45 per cent of the 8,339 requests in Switzerland.

A Google outline of scenarios leading to information being forgotten in searches included pages with content solely about someone's health, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Common causes for "delisting" pages also included criminal convictions regarding children or stories focusing on criminal charges that were subsequently overturned by courts.