Google’s Transparency Report for European privacy requests for search removals visualises the number of request and share of removed and not removed URLs by country. Google has labeled 95% of requests made under the Right to be Forgotten as ‘private personal info’. The remaining 5% made to other criminals, politicians and high-profile public figures.
The source code of the Google’s own Transparency Report website actually contained more data than the report visualised in its front-end.
But Google has accidentally revealed the details of privacy requests, it received from people. The Guardian discovered the details hidden in the source code on Google’s own transparency report.
In a May 2014 ruling, the Court of Justice of the European Union found that individuals have the right to ask search engines like Google to remove certain results about them. The court decided that search engines must assess each individual’s request for removal and that a search engine can only continue to display certain results where there is a public interest in doing so.
Google’s right to be forgotten works by first filling this web form either by individuals or their representatives. The individuals receive an automatic reply confirming that Google has received the request. They then assess each request on a case-by-case basis.
Google will notify the webmaster when pages from their site are removed from their search results based on a legal request by the interest of transparency. In order to respect the privacy of the individuals who have made removal requests, they only send the affected URLs, not the requester’s name.
Currently the removal includes the results from its search properties, like Google Search, Image Search, Video Search, and Google News.
But The Guardian revealed that the new data discovered in Google’s transparency report that was not considered reliable enough to release publicly. Google tells that this was a test categorisation of data. Yet even with a very big margin of error, the data would still show that the right to be forgotten issue is overwhelmingly about everyday people, often with little public profile – victims of algorithmic failure on the indelible web.
Google’s spokesperson said this to Techcrunch, “We’ve always aimed to be as transparent as possible about our right to be forgotten decisions. The data the Guardian found in our Transparency Report’s source code does of course come from Google, but it was part of a test to figure out how we could best categorise requests. We discontinued that test in March because the data was not reliable enough for publication. We are however currently working on ways to improve our transparency reporting.”
