Eesti in brief

Being forgettable

In the 14 months since Europe introduced the “right to be forgotten,” Google has received more than 280,000 requests to remove over one million links from its search results and the largest numbers of such requests per resident have come from Estonia and Liechtenstein, Suddeutsche Zeitung reports.

Google, which began taking right to be forgotten requests in May last year, detailed the current level of requests in an update to its Transparency Report. Of the 282,508 removal requests received, the internet giant evaluated 1,027,495 URLs for removal from its search results, and has dropped 359,803 or 41.3 percent. It declined to remove 511,623, or 58.7 percent of the links.

The number of requests filed from individual countries ranges from one hundred per million inhabitants in Greece and Bulgaria to more than one thousand from Estonia and Liechtenstein. Germany places in the middle of the list with 458 requests per one million inhabitants.

According to Google’s figures, the French were the most active requesters in Europe overall, filing 58,460 requests with Google to remove 197,526 URLs. Google has removed 52.3 percent there and not removed 47.7 percent. Germans lodged over 48,000 requests concerning 184,670 URLs, while British users filed 35,320 requests concerning 138,688 URLs.
Google says the site it had to remove most links to was facebook.com, where it has delisted 8,009 URLs from its search results.

Of the requests to remove search results received from Italy 12 percent had to do with serious criminal offenses. Of the requests coming from Romania 7 percent were linked to politicians while 8 percent of the requests from Hungary had to do with high-profile public figures. Germans were most often concerned about their personal data, as requests for the removal of private and personal information made up 98 percent of the requests filed in Germany, Suddeutsche Zeitung said.