Google has received more than 2.4 million requests to remove URLs from its Search under Europe's "Right to be Forgotten" laws since they were introduced in May 2014.
In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Justice established the "right to be forgotten," or more accurately, the "right to delist", allowing Europeans to ask search engines to delist information about themselves from search results.
"Since 2014, we've provided information about "right to be forgotten" delisting requests in our Transparency Report, including the number of URLs submitted to us, the number of URLs delisted and not delisted, and anonymised examples of some of the requests we have received," Michee Smith, Product Lead, Google Transparency Report, said in a blog post.
In deciding what to delist, search engines like Google must consider if the information in question is "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive" -- and whether there is a public interest in the information remaining available in search results.
"We're expanding the scope of our transparency reporting about the "right to be forgotten" and adding new data going back to January 2016 when our reviewers started manually annotating each URL submitted to us with additional information," Smith added.
About a third of the removal requests were related to social media and directory services, while around 21 per cent were URLs related to news outlets and government websites that mostly covered someone's legal history, The Verge reported on Wednesday.
According to Google, it shows a breakdown of the requests made by private individuals vs. non-private individuals -- like government officials or corporate entities.
"We classify the content that the individual has asked us to delist into a set of categories: personal information, professional information, crime, and name not found, meaning that we were not able to find the individual's name on the page," Smith further said.
"When we evaluate a URL for potential delisting, we classify the website that hosts the page as a directory site, news site, social media, or other," he added.
Google has also released draft of a new research paper called "Three Years of the Right to be Forgotten" which has been submitted for peer review.
BJP won’t ally with Uddhav Thackeray, nor in talks with Raj Thackeray: Devendra Fadnavis
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has said that the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) will not ally again with Shiv Sena's (UBT) Uddhav Thackeray, nor is it in any discussions with Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s Raj Thackeray for the ensuing Lok Sabha elections.
AI will be smarter than any single human by next year: Musk
Elon Musk who is currently locked in a battle with ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Wednesday that artificial intelligence (AI) will probably be smarter than any single human by next year.
India well-positioned to tackle infectious diseases, climate change, nutrition issues: Soumya Swaminathan
Globally, India has been a strong voice on climate change and may be pushing for equity because the effects of climate change are not felt in countries, which are not major contributors to the phenomenon.
NASA’s Crew 7 targets March 12 to return to Earth
NASA’s Crew 7 astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) are preparing to return to Earth, after a six-month stay in the orbiting lab, the US space agency has said.
Approval rating of PM Modi soars to 75% in Feb: Survey
The survey recorded slightly lower ratings in metros (64 per cent), Tier 2 (62 per cent) cities, and self-employed (59 per cent) persons. The lowest rating came from the south zone (35 per cent).
Meta suffers mega outage as FB, Instagram, Messenger stop working for millions
In one of the worst outages for Meta in years, its entire family of apps -- Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads -- went down for millions across the globe, including in India, as users were thrown out from their accounts.
HM Amit Shah kickstarts BJP campaign; rips political dynasties, Maha Oppn leaders
Amidst all this ‘parivarwad’, he said there is nobody except Modi to think and care for the masses and aim to make the country fully developed by 2047, and make a world leader, a ‘Vishwaguru’.
Kajal Memorial Football Tournament: Tripura Sports School to face Mungiakami School in final
Tripura Sports school once again played with lots of dominance and continued their good record in this tournament as previously they won the title for three times.