A couple months after the Right To Be Forgotten issue with the EU has begun, the content removal requests have been piling up. It makes you wonder how long it’ll take to finally see if the requests will continue to rise, or will begin plateauing. Just on the first day of availability of the RTBF online form cam 12,000 submissions. That’s quite a number for the first day.
Those sources who are familiar with the status of the RTBF program has said that 91,000 takedown requests from across Europe have come in, and involve almost 330,000 URLS since the court decision was formalized earlier in the year. Based on the numbers, it would appear that the amount of requests coming in have slowed down. This is probably due to the “early adopter” situation that cases like this would normally have. Because most of the early adopters have sent in their requests, the amount of requests that will continue coming in will now taper off to a more “normal” amount of requests coming in.
What we may not normally hear about is the number of rejections actually taking place. You’d think that just because you request to have something taken down, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. About 30% of all request are rejected. In 15% of all cases, Google seeks more information about the requests. So, mathematically, more than half of the requests send in are actually approved. So I guess that’s good news for European criminals, rapists and pedophiles.
Last week, Bing introduced their own RTBF site. Good luck Bing!