Internet search engine Google is planning to put an alert at the bottom of results pages to show that links have been removed, following the landmark ruling saying that European citizens can demand that information on them be erased.
May’s ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) allows people living in Europe to ask for links to “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” material to be removed from search results, although the information will still be available on the original web page.
In a bid to comply with the ruling, Google has launched an online form for people who want material to be removed to fill in. The company does not have to comply with every request but must consider whether removing the information is in the public interest and has set up an advisory committee to issue recommendations about where the boundaries of the public interest lie.
Since the ruling, the search company has been deluged with over 40,000 requests to take sensitive information down but the search engine is planning on showing that the search results have been censored.
Worryingly, in the light of public interest, according to Google, almost a third of the requests to take material down related to fraud or scams, a fifth concerned serious crime and 12 per cent were connected to child pornography arrests.
The internet giant is also planning to include information about “right to be forgotten” removals in its biannual transparency report, which reveals the number of government requests worldwide to have material removed from search results.
However, anti-censorship campaigners say that the fact that Google plans to add ‘flags’ to search links it has removed does nothing to tackle the fundamental problem with the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling, which is the complete absence of legal oversight in the process.