In May 2014, the highest court in the EU ruled that, in certain cases, Google must remove links to someone's personal information, if requested.
And request people did: Over the past year, the search engine received 254,271 appeals (about 670 per day) asking to evaluate more than 922,638 URLs.
Less than half have actually been removed, according to the company's latest transparency report, which reported that 58.7 percent still available online. When we say removed, we don't mean from the Internet as a whole, just Google's EU search results. So residents of England or France, for example, could switch from Google.co.uk or Google.fr to Google.com and see results that have been "forgotten" in the EU.
The case dates back to 1998, when a man attempted to have a newspaper article about his Social Security debts scrubbed from Google search results. Google won in June 2013 when the EU's high court found that search engines are not required to remove such links, provided publication of the data is legal.
That decision was overturned, allowing residents of the European Union's 28 member states to petition for certain links to be removed from search results. Technically, this applies to all search engines, not just Google. Microsoft's Bing, for example, is also accepting "right to be forgotten" requests, but Google has gotten most of the press.
At the time, Google called the decision "a disappointing ruling for search engines and online publishers in general," but has reluctantly complied. Within hours of launching its removal request form in late May 2014, Google received 12,000 applications asking that shady Web histories be expunged. By the end of that week, the company was buried under 41,000 appeals.
That number has grown exponentially in one year, as European residents ask that recent articles discussing a high-ranking Hungarian public official's decades-old criminal conviction be removed. (No such luck, Google said.)
A political activist in Latvia who was stabbed at a protest, however, was honoured with their request for the removal of the link to an article about the incident.
In deciding what to scrub, Google weighs each individual application in an attempt to balance the privacy rights of that person with the public's right to know and distribute information. So folks looking to erase info about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials shouldn't hold their breath for a free pass.
Unsurprisingly, networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google+ landed in the top 10 sites for URLs requested for removal. Rounding out the list are profileengine.com, groups.google.com, badoo.com, yasni.de, wherevent.com, and 192.com. With 37,731 removed links, these sites account for 8 percent of Google's total requests.
In February, the 10-person Google advisory board denied the EU's request to expand its "right to be forgotten" option beyond Europe.
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