Google approved 40% of 250K 'right to be forgotten' requests in last year

It’s one year on from the the ‘EU Right to be Forgotten’ ruling, and reports have emerged that Google has processed 253,617 data removal requests since, but has only approved just over 40%.

Dina Shiloh, a Solicitor at Mishcon de Reya who specialises in media law, commented on the impact this decision has made during the last year:

“In principle, the decision last May demonstrated that Europeans have the right to control their own data and how it is processed. The decision showed that in Europe, privacy is not dead. Google can no longer argue that it is a neutral ‘wall’ with no responsibility to the content it links to.”

Shiloh goes to on explain, however, the situation is far from simple:

“For example, if Google.com – where the US version of Google is hosted – is searched, the articles that have been ‘forgotten’ by Google in Europe can still be found. Also, the ECJ’s decision that Google should not link to ‘inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive’ material is incredibly broad: we are still struggling to define those terms. In addition, anyone in the public eye may find it difficult to argue information about them is irrelevant- again, ‘the public eye’ is not an easy thing to define. Finally, even if requests are granted, the fact remains that those same articles are still available online, on the sites where they were originally published, whether Google links to them or not. The ‘right to be forgotten’ is not absolute.”