Search Engine Handling of Right To Be Forgotten Said Stabilizing, but Concerns Remain

Two years after the European Court of Justice ruling requiring search engines to "delist" certain information upon an individual's request (see 1405140036), several concerns remain about the "right to be forgotten" (RTBF), said Reputation VIP CEO Bertrand Girin. One is the lack of awareness that people whose RTBF requests have been denied by Google or other search engines can seek re-examination by their local data protection authorities (DPAs), he said. Another is a lack of consistency of removal across Google territories, said reputation management company Igniyte client services head Roz Sheldon.

From May 29, 2014, to April 29, 2016, Google received 423,974 delisting requests for nearly 1.5 million URLs, a Reputation VIP report said. Google continued to cut its request processing time from 49 to 20 days on average, then to 14 days in the first quarter of this year, the report said.

Google refuses more than 70 percent of requests, the most common of which concern invasion of privacy through disclosure of private addresses and religious or political opinions against someone's will, it said. Google is increasingly refusing to get rid of links relating to someone's professional activity, it said. Media sites are "relatively unaffected by requests," with only around 4 percent of requests about pages on press websites, compared with 19 percent for social networks, Reputation VIP said. Directories get the highest percentage of positive responses from Google for delisting, "indicating the search engine's comprehension of the concern for individuals," the report said. Germany and the U.K. top the list of countries with the most RTBF requests, followed by France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Romania, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, Reputation VIP said.

Google has more than 90 percent of the European search engine market, vs. around 4.5 percent for Microsoft's Bing, the report said. On average, users make fewer requests to Bing -- 3.7 URLs per user compared with 10.7 URLs per user for Google, it said. Invasion of privacy is also the top reason for RTBF applications on Bing, but Bing takes much longer (41 days) on average to handle requests than does Google, it said.

One concern that remains to be addressed is what recourse those whose RTBF requests have been rejected have, Girin told us. A September Reputation VIP survey showed that 79 percent of people who have made such a request and received a negative response from Google don't know they can ask their local DPA to review their request, he said. Two findings of the RTBF report were surprising, Girin said. One was the five-point increase in removal in the "invasion of privacy" category, the other that the demand rate has remained steady over two years, he told us. Girin also wondered why Google's rejection rate rose from 60 percent in 2014 to 75 percent last year.

The Reputation VIP results "are consistent with our experience with RTBF and types of requests we receive from individuals," Igniyte's Sheldon said. Requests involving figures in the public eye and high-ranking press articles are the least likely to be removed, which is consistent with the authority of the press and journalists' right to free speech, she said. "Google already reflects this authority in search results as press article[s] often rank more highly." Sheldon said it's interesting that RTBF requests involve such a high number of social media sites, since those platforms already tend to offer their own content removal policies and procedures for take-down at the source.

But there are inconsistencies in the way results are removed, because some results return after being delisted, Sheldon emailed. In other cases, Google removes most of a listing but leaves the URL/link in search results, "effectively defeating the purpose of RTBF." The search engine also sometimes delists in European results but leaves them visible across Google.com, .au or .jp, for example, she said. Google "has resisted hiding them in the US, Japan and Australia," an April 26 Igniyte blog noted.

“Rightly or wrongly the RTBF has always been more concerned with data protection and not as a means for individuals to hide their past actions," Sheldon said. The latter is highly subjective, leading to questions such as how long a press article detailing a public individual's misdemeanor should remain visible on Google, or whether someone no longer in the public eye should be able to move on without the stigma of outdated information, she said. "It may be that Google will need to downgrade the importance of aged articles in search over time," and case law will also continue to dictate to some extent where Google is happy to consider information removal, she added.

Google didn't comment on the Reputation VIP report. Microsoft reviews each request "in accordance with the European Court of Justice's ruling and the Art. 29 Working Party's guidelines, and seek[s] to appropriately balance individuals' rights to privacy with the public's interest in access to information online," a company spokesperson said. Microsoft's content removal requests report for the second half of 2015 showed that of 9,800 RTBF requests received and processed from May 2014 to December 2015, the search engine accepted 43 percent of the 24,812 URLs individuals sought to have removed.