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Google's Transparency Report reveals that since the Court of Justice of the European Union's ruling on May 13, 2014 that established "the right to be forgotten" for Europeans, Google has received 255,143 requests to remove a total of 925,586 URLs. Google removed 323,482 of those URLs (41.3%).
However, that effort isn't enough for some:
Google is receiving a telling off from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office and may face legal action after failing to adequately respond to several so-called "right to be forgotten" requests. The ICO told The Register that "since the details of the ruling were first announced, we have handled over 183 complaints from those unhappy with Google's response to their takedown request". The ICO estimates that Google has mismanaged individuals' requests to remove their information in a quarter of cases.
The independent UK body set up to uphold information rights also says it will now be looking to resolve the 48 remaining cases "through discussion and negotiation with Google, though we have enforcement powers available to us if required".
In addition, 80 legal experts have written an open letter to Google demanding more data about how Google responds to removal requests:
What We Seek
Aggregate data about how Google is responding to the >250,000 requests to delist links thought to contravene data protection from name search results. We should know if the anecdotal evidence of Google's process is representative: What sort of information typically gets delisted (e.g., personal health) and what sort typically does not (e.g., about a public figure), in what proportions and in what countries?
Why It's Important
Google and other search engines have been enlisted to make decisions about the proper balance between personal privacy and access to information. The vast majority of these decisions face no public scrutiny, though they shape public discourse. What's more, the values at work in this process will/should inform information policy around the world. A fact-free debate about the RTBF is in no one's interest.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday May 15 2015, @05:58PM
I'm a US citizen. When I lived in Canada I had three servers, two in the US and one in The Netherlands.
Does an EU citizen have the right to be forgotten in US searches of websites that are on US servers?
Do I - now residing in the US - have the right for my Netherlands server to be forgotten?
What about a Tor Hidden Service, as is operated by DuckDuckGo?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Friday May 15 2015, @06:23PM
It all seems somewhat complicated. Which is why inquiring academic minds want to know how this actually works. From what can be gathered they are not forgotten or removed; after all google doesn't (or can't) remove the data. Instead it seems more like an output display option. As in if you are in country X in Europe and do a search for something that has been "forgotten" it won't pop up in the result list for that country or region. But if you sit in the USA, or some non-EU region, and does the same search it will show up. I assume this is how they have found out some of these "forgotten" people and articles, different regions producing different results for the same search criteria. So while some pedophile or whatnot will be "invisible" in (parts of) Europe the same data will be viewable elsewhere.
Does an EU citizen have the right to be forgotten in US searches of websites that are on US servers?
Yes, but only partly. It seems to be only for EU citizens searching from the EU to have the result displayed in the EU. The query will be sent from the EU to a server in the US but the output result in EU will be cropped due to some forgotten blocklist. So if you can hide your location from Google or make google believe you are in the USA you should get to the full search result (unless there is some US blocking for some reason).
Do I - now residing in the US - have the right for my Netherlands server to be forgotten?
Probably not. You are not a citizen and while you might fill in the form and apply I don't know why your .nl server would need to be forgotten. What did it do that would need to be forgotten? Did it touch the other servers in the nono place? Plus it's for people not for machines.
I recon the TOR output or if you can change your location in some other fashion you'll get the output from the last machine in the tor-chain. So if that happens to be another EU machine then you might get the EU result, if the exit node was in China you might get that. But that is pure speculation on my part since I have not tried it.
Wikipedia has a list of pages it has had to remove in different regions due to this.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Notices_received_from_search_engines [wikimediafoundation.org]