27.07.2014 - 11:03 [ Techdirt ]

EU Regulators Want Google To Expand Right To Be Forgotten Worldwide And To Stop Telling What Links Have Been Forgotten

We‘ve been covering the ridiculous ruling in the EU on the „right to be forgotten,“ which was interpreted to mean that search engines could be forced to delete links to perfectly truthful stories (and even if those stories are allowed to be kept online). Google has been trying to comply with the over 90,000 requests it has received — nearly half of which it has approved — and removed from its European searches. The company has been struggling to figure out how to comply with the ruling, and those struggles continue. Originally, it was going to place a notice on search results pages where links had been removed (like it does with copyright takedowns) alerting people that stories were missing. However, regulators told Google that would defeat the purpose. So now, Google‘s European search results show a message on nearly every search on a „name“ that results might have been removed.