Google processes nearly a million links under ‘right to be forgotten’ after EU court ruling

Google has started taking requests from people in the European region to remove some of the objectionable results from Google's search listings following a European Union court order.

The internet search company had received over 253,000 removal requests covering over 920,000 links so far and it had removed a little over 40 per cent of those links, about 380,000.

According to Google, after the launch of its request process since 29 May, the EU's biggest companies accounted for the highest number of requests.

It emerged that objectionable search results were the biggest concern among French and German population with around 780 requests per million inhabitants received from France, and 530 per million from Germany.

The corresponding numbers for UK, Spain and Italy were 500 per million, 490 per million, and 310 per million.

Google, however, accepted around 50 per cent of the link removal requests from France and Germany.

On 13 May, 2014, Europeans won the right to be forgotten by search engines thanks to a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).

The company's online transparency tool showed that in almost 60 per cent of the cases, search results that people wanted the company to remove stayed visible.

Under the court's landmark privacy ruling in 2014, which came to be known as the 'right to be forgotten', search engines were made accountable for the data they processed.

The court's order stipulated that individuals could ask search engines to remove certain links from the results of searches for their names, if the links led to material that was outdated, excessive, or irrelevant.

Thanks to the internet search company's dominance of the search market in Europe, it had been left shouldering the bulk of requests. It would need to decide whether the requests were valid or not according to whether it viewed the content linked to as "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed".

In case of any disagreement with Google's decision, people could turn to a national data protection authority, which could then take the matter up with Google to come to a final decision.