The “right to be forgotten” complaints are far from over

A group of Internet scholars and legal academics has called on Google to be more transparent about its decision-making process in regards to its implementation of Europe’s so-called ‘Right to be forgotten‘ ruling. It’s one year since Europe’s top court handed down a legal ruling that requires search engines to process private individuals’ requests for the delisting inaccurate, outdated or irrelevant data returned by a search result for their name. In that time, Google has processed around 250,000 individual requests, granting delisting to individual requesters in around 40 per cent of cases. In making these delisting decisions, Google and other search engines are required to weigh up any public interest in knowing the information. It’s more transparency about how Google is making those value judgements that the group is essentially calling for. They are focusing on Google specifically because it is by far the dominant search engine in Europe (with a circa 90 per cent share of the market), arguing that the information that Google has released thus far has been “anecdotal” — and does not allow outsiders to judge how representative it is.