Within just four days of the right to be deleted web page going live, Google has received over 41,000 requests – somewhere around 7 requests a minute.
Google’s way of complying with EU’s “right to be forgotten” court ruling was to start taking requests through a web page. On the first day itself, Google received well over 12,000 requests and the 41,000 figure at the end of four days indicate that number of people who are interested in having their data deleted from Google may be dwindling, but it hasn’t definitely subsided.
With an average of 10,000 requests per day and 7 a minute, Google may have either hired new staffer or shuffled some of its internal resources to handle the huge inflow of requests. According to reports, most of the requests have come from Germany and the UK.
According to the EU court ruling, individuals have the right to have links to information about them removed form search engine results and that search engines should provide a mechanism through which individuals can apply for a removal.
However, the court has also ruled that the removal of links “should be balanced against a public interest in the information being linked to.”
It is noteworthy that only the links from the search engine results will be removed and not the content to which it links to.
