Google is developing an online tool which would allow users to request to remove search engine results following a EU court ruling – “right to be forgotten.”
Earlier this week, the EU court ruled that people have the “right to be forgotten”. Following the ruling Google has been receiving several requests from Europeans. Google is also getting requests from criminals for removing links pointing to their crimes. The Tuesdays ruling meant that people have the right to request search engines to remove search results which they feel is irrelevant.
Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman said “A simple way of understanding what happened here is that you have a collision between a right to be forgotten and a right to know. From Google’s perspective that’s a balance. Google believes haivng looked at the decision, which is binding, that the balance that was struck was wrong.”
Google will need “an army of removal experts” in 28 European Union territories including regions were Google does not have operations, according to a source. The source also mentioned that Google is yet to figure out whether the company would remove controversial links or judge the merits of individual take-down requests.
However removal requests will require authentication to confirm if the person seeking the removal is who he/she claims to be. Google is the most popular search engine in Europe occupying 93 percent of the market while Microsoft’s Bing has 2.4 percent and Yahoo has 1.3 percent, according to StatCounter global statistics.
A Yahoo spokeswoman stated that Yahoo is “carefully reviewing” the decision to assess the impact for its business and its users. Google said it was disappointed with the ruling and deleting information from search results would interfere with freedom of expression.
