14 DAY TRIAL // As much as some would like to disappear from Google’s records, it seems that the search engine is unwilling to let go of its collection of data as more and more requests from people wanting to have their information deleted are rejected.
Despite the fact that The European Court of Justice ruled that Google must remove from its search results any links directing to "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” information about a person, it seems that people are still unable to convince the tech giant that some of the data available online should not be reachable to third parties.
It’s already been a year since the "right to be forgotten" has been implemented and Google seems to have some though times parting with its precious data, as results published in its transparency report show that from the 250,000 requests that the company has received from people, only 40 percent of them have been approved.
The company also revealed that they had to undergo the process of carefully examining around 1 million links which involved the individuals who had submitted the requests.
Google explains why it rebuffs most of the demands
To account for the approximately 60 percent who have been denied the right to be forgotten and having their information removed from the Internet, Google also revealed which are the most common cases that they have encountered.
One such example is that of public figures asking the search giant to get rid of all the URLs linking to different crimes that they had committed in the past and which affect their reputation, "A high-ranking public official asked us to remove recent articles discussing a decades-old criminal conviction." As expected, Google rejected the demand.
The company also provided a list of the sites which received a greater impact in the purging process, and unsurprisingly, Facebook is in the leading position with 6805 URLs removed from the site. YouTube, Google+ and Twitter are in the top ten websites affected by the changes.
However, those who have been denied the request for data removal still have a shot to go against Google’s decision if they feel aggrieved by appealing to local data protection authority to dispute the verdict.
The removal is not wholesale
What’s more, people filling the requests should know that Google only removes the URLs from the search results related to the individual’s name, but they would still appear under other keywords related to the event in question, "if we granted a request to remove an article for John Smith about his trip to Paris, we would not show the result for queries relating to [john smith] but we would show it for a query like [trip to paris]."