Within the first 24 hours, the Google’s new court-mandated webform has been flooded with thousands of requests to remove “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,” content from search results.
The webform which went live in Europe on Friday complies with the Data Protection Law’s “right to be forgotten,” and provides the European citizens a chance to pull out the outdated and irrelevant information available online.
Google has officially confirmed that over 12,000 requests have been received from EU citizens on the first day, with at times around 20 requests per minute. Around 40 percent of the requests received were from Germany, while 13 percent from UK.
The company noted that more than 31 percent of the requests were from people seeking to have records related to scams and frauds removed.
The search engine bowed under the pressure of losing a lawsuit to Spanish citizen, as European Court of Justice ruled earlier this month that Google has to honour the citizens’ “right to be forgotten.”
Following the ruling, Google promised to create a webform online providing the EU citizens an opportunity to request to remove data, similar to its copyright content takedown request.
“The court’s ruling requires Google to make difficult judgements about an individual’s right to be forgotten and the public’s right to know,” a Google spokesman said about the ruling.
The company said that before complying or denying the requests from citizens, each request submitted will be thoroughly checked if it falls within the criteria listed by the European Court. However, if this pace of requests continues, Google will surely have a tough time in assessing the requests.
