Thousands of Europeans are scrambling to take advantage of a
new legal right to force Google to delete search results about them.
Read more: Google Has Received Nearly 145,000 Requests to Be 'Forgotten' - NationalJournal.com
Since
the process began several months ago, Google has received 144,954
requests to delete 497,695 pages from its search engine, the company
revealed in a report Friday.
But
Google actually rejected most of the requests under the "right to be
forgotten." The company granted 41.8 percent of the requests to scrub
links.
Facebook was the most common site that people tried to hide from search results, followed by profileengine.com, a site that archives social-media information. Google's own YouTube came in third.
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were the top sources of requests to delete links, according to the report.
"We
believe it's important to be transparent about how much information
we're removing from search results while being respectful of individuals
who have made requests," Jess Hemerly, a public policy manager at Google, said in a blog post. "Releasing this information to the public helps hold us accountable for our process and implementation."
The
top European court ruled in May that companies must delete "inadequate,
irrelevant, or no longer relevant" pages. The ruling was based on
Europe's privacy laws, which are much more expansive than those in the
U.S. People argued they shouldn't be haunted for their whole lives by
embarrassing Web pages.
Note EU-Digest: one of the many benefits of being part of the EU
Note EU-Digest: one of the many benefits of being part of the EU
Read more: Google Has Received Nearly 145,000 Requests to Be 'Forgotten' - NationalJournal.com