The benchmark ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ ruling by a European judge justifying the removal of irrelevant digital assets and data is now, a year old. The judge had ruled that data which was no longer ‘relevant’ should not be displayed on search engines, such as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Bing’s, results pages.
The ruling was limited to local versions of the search engine within Europe. The epoch-marking ruling was widely criticized by many, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. He had called it ‘ridiculous,’ at that time.
Statistics collated a year later indicate that the use of the Right To be Forgotten Rule has been prolific immediately after the ruling. Significantly, the number of requests asking for deleting irrelevant data in recent months has come down.
According to official statement by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) in its latest Transparency Report, the number of requests were 253,617. In 2014 the number of requests were as high as 1,500 per day immediately after the ruling. However, the current levels of request are at 500 per day.
The company had struggled with the steep number of requests at the beginning. However, over time, with additional resources it has commendable lowered the processing time to remove data to 16 days from 56 days in mid-2014. The search engine giant had allowed requests to be placed via a form appended in its Help page.
Forget.me
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) requests handling statistics, for personal data is significantly different according to online reputation management company, Forget.me or Reputation VIP. The company claims that of the 61,753 URLs it had sent Google, the individual requests for refusal was at 70%. On the other hand, Google Inc has claimed that it removes nearly 41.3% of the requests it received.
Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) statistics reveal that nearly 60% of the data removal applications are based on issues involving ‘invasion of privacy.’
