ANKARA
Google has received a total of 144,954 privacy requests for search removals, also known as “right to be forgotten” requests, from European citizens since end of May, the company said Friday.
The company said the requests encompassed 497,507 different webpages, the total number of online links Google evaluated.
In a report, Google said it removed 41.8 percent of the requested webpages and did not remove 58.2 percent of them.
France leads the list of the countries where the most requests for webpage removal came from, with 89,168 webpages, followed by Germany, 88,883 webpages, and Great Britain, 63,606 webpages.
Facebook tops the list of most-impacted sites with 3,332 webpages removed, followed by Profile engine with 3,289 webpages and YouTube with 2,392 pages removed.
Google gave the example of an Italian woman who requested that it remove a decades-old article about her husband’s murder that included her name.
“The page has been removed from search results for her name,” Google said adding that in assessing each request, it considered the rights of the individual as well as public interest in the content.
The Court of Justice of European Union found in May that individuals had the right to ask search engines such as Google to remove certain results about them.
Google said that it evaluated each request separately, as the court decided that search engines must assess each individual requests for removal and that a search engine could only continue to display certain results where there was a public interest in doing so.
www.aa.com.tr/en
