Search giant Google has released this week a new figure for its Transparency report. The company’s new figure revealed that it received a total of 654,808 requests to remove 2,436,788 URLs. But the search giant has reportedly delisted only 43.3 percent of the URLs, a small figure of the URLs it reviewed.
Google, since May 2014, has opposed a local court decision enforced by Europe’s privacy watchdogs. Now, the company has also added new details like the type of requesters including the type of content requested. It also includes information such as the type of site requested like the directory, social media, or government page.
Why Google was asked to delist URLs?
Apart from this, Google said the content further includes “personal information, professional information, crime, and name not found, meaning that we were not able to find the individual’s name on the page.”
What is clear though is that some people want the delisting because it wants to remove results. A new study titled ‘Three years of the Right to be Forgotten’, revealed about the top 1,000 requesters. The number of requesters actually account for 0.25 percent, of which they filed 14.5 percent of requests as well as the 20.8 percent of delistings.
In case you don’t know, the group of requesters are composed of law firms and reputation-management agencies. The business companies are based in United Kingdom, France, and Germany, an information disclosed by researchers.
Furthermore, the study has noted that only 35 percent of requesters filed a request for one URL to be delisted. Meanwhile, 75 percent request of the information filed by requesters filed five or fewer URLs.
“These results illustrate that while hundreds of thousands of Europeans rely on the RTBF to delist a handful of URLs, there are thousands of entities using the RTBF to alter hundreds of URLs about them or their clients that appear in search results,” the authors of the paper noted.
