Google’s latest transparency report have revealed a 40 percent rise since the search engine last revealed its “forget me” figures in May. The latest data reveals that Google has evaluated 1,234,092 URLs from 348,085 requests that have requested for removal.
France leads the pack in terms of the number of removal requests with more than 73,000 requests received by French Internet users, followed by Germany and Great Britain. To be evaluated under “Right To Be Forgotten”, Google handles each request individually. Users need to fill out an online form to specify which information ‘needs to be forgotten” from search engine listings. Reports suggest it takes about 15-20 days for Google to process an application, which is fully reviewed by the company. Google then creates an outline of scenarios after which it arrives at a conclusion whether the information needs to be forgotten from searches. For more serious cases, a group of senior employees at Google discuss and decide the merits of a forget me request.
“We may decline to delist if we determined that the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest.Google must consider the rights of the individual as well as public interest in the content,” the company outlined in a post.
It is worth pointing out that the social networking giant Facebook was the top site where users wanted information to be scrubbed from search results. As according to the report a total of 10,220 URLs were removed. Next common venue for removals was profileengine.com, with 7,986 links requested to be removed search listings. While the top 10 sites requesting URLs to be forgotten included profileengine.com, YouTube, Badoo, Twitter, along with the Google Plus network
As of now, data is only removed from domestic search listings such as Google.de or Google.co.uk, however, EU authorities want the search engine giant to apply these restrictions on its main google.com.