Google starts removing some search results in EU

Google has started removing some search results in the EU following an EU court telling it last month to respond to requests by people seeking the ''right to be forgotten,'' Bloomberg reports.

The company started offering an online tool to allow people to ask for search results to be redacted after the EU Court of Justice ruled on 13 May that the fundamental rights of citizens could be compromised by information on the web and where there was no public interest in its publication.

The right-to-be-forgotten ruling comes as a surprise for Google and other companies already faced with greater scrutiny over privacy practices in the 28-nation EU.

The company said on its web site that it had been ''working round the clock to comply'' with the court ruling. It would assess each individual request and ''balance the rights of the individual to control his or her personal data with'' the public's right to know and distribute information, the company added.

For removal, personal information would need to be ''inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant, or excessive.''

According to Al Verney, a spokesman for the company in Brussels, California-based Google was ''starting to take action on the removals requests that we've received.''

Under the order by the continent's highest court last month, individuals can demand that Google remove links to information that they considered "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive," Los Angeles Times reported.

However, while some want to return to the days before the internet, others expect society to adapt to the reality of information persistence.

Meanwhile, the company's move in Europe has led to at least one critic of the company, John M Simpson of Consumer Watchdog, demanding that the company pursue the same policy in the US. "The Internet giant should offer US users the same basic right to privacy," Simpson demanded in a news release.

The order by the EU's Court of Justice left it for Google to decide how to best balance competing interests. According to the court, individual privacy interests overrode the public's right to know "as a general rule." However, the exact balance would depend partly on "the role played by the data subject in public life."