Alfie Joshua
It wasn’t too long ago that the European courts had ruled that Google had to comply with requests from users for the right to be forgotten. This means that a person could file a request with Google asking them to be removed from the search results. That user will have to fill out a form, submit the links that are being displayed, and also photo identification. It sounds like a pretty straightforward request, but it seems that Google is starting to become a bit overwhelmed by the entire proceedings. Writing for The Guardian, Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, revealed that Google has since received over 70,000 takedown requests from over 250,000 websites since the feature went live in May.
When you search online there’s an unwritten assumption that you’ll get an instant answer, as well as additional information if you need to dig deeper. This is all possible because of two decades’ worth of investment and innovation by many different companies. Today, however, search engines across Europe face a new challenge – one we’ve had just two months to get our heads around. That challenge is figuring out what information we must deliberately omit from our results, following a ruling from the European Union’s court of justice. In the past we’ve restricted the removals we make from search to a very short list. It includes information deemed illegal by a court (such as defamation), pirated content (once we’re notified by the right’s holder), malware, personal information such as bank details, child sexual abuse imagery and other things prohibited by local law (such as material that glorifies Nazism in Germany). We’ve taken this approach because, as article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
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