It wasn’t too long ago that the European courts had ruled that Google had to comply with requests from users for the right to be forgotten. This means that a person could file a request with Google asking them to be removed from the search results. That user will have to fill out a form, submit the links that are being displayed, and also photo identification.
It sounds like a pretty straightforward request, but it seems that Google is starting to become a bit overwhelmed by the entire proceedings. Writing for The Guardian, Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond, revealed that Google has since received over 70,000 takedown requests from over 250,000 websites since the feature went live in May.
Drummond admits that because of this, Google has incorrectly removed some links in the process. ”Of course, only two months in our process is still very much a work in progress. It’s why we incorrectly removed links to some articles last week (they’ve since been reinstated).”
However he also adds that because of this and possibly because there will be even more takedown requests in the future, that Google is putting together an advisory council of experts to help them examine such issues more deeply. In the meantime Microsoft is also planning on offering such a service to Bing users in Europe and hopefully they will be able to learn from Google’s mistakes.