Oh, Right To Be Forgotten (RTBF), how we love you. Has it really been a year since you came into our lives? Simply, yes. It’s been about a year since the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg (in Europe) was formally established, and since then, Google has received just over 254,000 removal requests all across Europe.
Despite the fact that countless people across Europe have requested something was “forgotten” on the google.co.uk search site, most of them have actually been turned down. According to Reputation VIP, who operates the Forget.me in Europe, a whopping 70 percent of RTBF requests have gotten denied by Google. The amount of time it takes to process these requests has also declined from 56 days to only 16 since RTBF was first introduced.
The top countries, according the Reputation VIP, that are making the most requests include the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, and France. It also looks like the most-often cited reason behind the RTBF requests was for privacy invasion. Below is a chart that shows the entire hierarchy of removal justifications, based on the Reputation VIP data.
Even after almost a year since RTBF came about, there is still debate going on about the scope of the removals. Because Google limited removals to the local, European versions foe the company’s index and results, politicians and regulators across Europe feel like they’re the only ones in this situation, and feel that the removals should apply to the entirety of Google’s index. Google decided to decline extending them to Google.com.
Not to make themselves out to be totally evil, Google chose to make it tougher for people in Europe and elsewhere to circumvent the local version of Google and instead use Google.com