But the data that the Guardian analyzed reveals that the requests that Google accepted were overwhelming sourced from ordinary people seeking privacy of their information, Although there are hundreds of thousands of right to be forgotten requests submitted by politicians, criminals and other public persons, only a small percentage (1-2%) of these requests were actually approved by Google and listings removed. It has pointed to “former politicians wanting posts removed that criticize their policies in office; serious, violent criminals asking for articles about their crimes to be deleted; bad reviews for professionals like architects and teachers; comments that people have written themselves (and now regret)”.
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The removed links are no longer searchable on European Google results pages (google.ie, google.co.uk or google.fr, for example).
According to the Guardian, of the almost 220,000 requests received as of March, more than 95 percent came from everyday citizens throughout Europe wanting links to private and personal information removed. It allowed European citizens to request that search engines stop returning links to information that is out of date, excessive, or irrelevant when people search for their names.
The French are the most prolific submitters of right to be forgotten requests, accounting for one-fifth of the total number.
The leaked figures suggest Google is adhering to those principles. While before we knew little more than the fact that more than half of requests are declined, we now have a few extra snippets of information such as learning that over 95 percent of requests come from the general public rather than high-profile people. “The data the Guardian found in our Transparency Report’s source code does of course come from Google, but it was part of a test to figure out how we could best categorise requests”.
Google has never publicly released data on the how it deals with these requests, which only apply to its European search results.
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Google says it has evaluated over a million links in handling some 282,508 “Right To Be Forgotten” requests since it launched the request process in Europe on May 29, 2014. We discontinued that test in March because the data was not reliable enough for publication.
