Google reveals details about “right to be forgotten” requests

Five months after Europe gave its citizens a right to be forgotten on the Internet, Google has had to do a lot of forgetting. Since May 29, when Google set up the deletion process, the search engine has received requests to remove almost 500,000 links, according to data published by Google on Thursday in its first transparency report on the controversial “right to be forgotten.”

Facebook, and Google’s own services, are among the websites to be most affected by Europe’s so-called right to be forgotten, according to figures Google released on Thursday. As part of an update to its online transparency report, Google said that it had removed more links to content on Facebook from its search results than from any other site, in response to people’s requests to have links to material expunged to protect their privacy. Two of Google’s services — YouTube and the online forum Google Groups — were also among the products most affected by such requests.