Bing begins abiding by Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law

Bing has become the latest search engine to abide by the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ whereby search engine removal requests must be considered from users. The ruling was made by the Court of Justice of the European Union on 13 May, since which Google has received in excess of 20,000 ‘right to be forgotten’ requests from the UK alone. Now Microsoft will also commenced responding to such requests with the first links already having been pulled under the new regime.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing has begun to remove search results in Europe that mention individuals who have invoked their ‘right to be forgotten’, reports removal request service Forget.me. Following a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union in May, Bing began accepting removal requests in July by releasing a form for users to fill out. Forget.me reports that users of its service who requested Bing to remove requests have now begun to receive responses. Of the 699 requests made via Forget.me, 79 have received responses so far, all of which have been refusals to comply. Two of the refusals cite unjustified reasoning, while the rest are responses to search results pointing to content on social networks, for which Bing suggests requesting takedowns directly on those social networks for effective search result removal.