Saturday, July 05, 2014

Is Google over censuring in Europe when implementing the right to be forgotten?

European press has been active. A lot of criticism and scrutiny of Google and the way it’s applying the new “Right to be forgotten” rules.

Let’s take The guardian as an example.
A quick search, led me to all these different articles (among so many others!) just in the last few days:


The criticisms are several.
The Guardian, Daily Mail and BBC complained about the Search Engine application of the European rule.
According to the EU rule, the information must be either inaccurate, irrelevant or outdated to be kept outside of a search, and according to the news, publishers are complaining about Google being too hasty and removing searches that don’t fulfill any of these 3 criteria.

Is this causing the Streisand effect in a large scale?
The Guardian has an article with links to all articles that were removed from Google’s searches. The story of Dougie McDonald, the referee that admitted to have lied about awarding a penalty in the Scottish FA Cup, is all over the place.

An important remark
The way Google is applying the law is by omitting search results when you search for the specific name, however searches for any other words can lead you to those articles, so those webpages will still be accessible through Google.

Some key facts and numbers
  • +90% of searches in Europe are done through Google
  • +70,000 requests to remove links
  • France (14,086), Germany (12,678), the UK (8,497), Spain (6,176) and Italy (5,934) are the countries where most requests come from
  • +12,000 requests a day at the beginning of the implementation
  • ~1,000 requests a day currently
  • Unspecified number of paralegals deal with the requests

No comments: