There is a saying that you should be careful of what you post online, because once it goes onto the internet, it stays there forever. However over in Europe, Google has had to comply with requests for the right to be forgotten, thanks to a ruling by the European Union’s courts. Basically what this means is that Google would have to remove search results pertaining to a particular person.
Now it looks like Microsoft could soon be following in Google’s footsteps as they plan to offer a right to be forgotten request form of their own, in which they would remove certain search results from their Bing search engine. Given that Microsoft and Yahoo have a partnership in which Yahoo will use the Bing search engine to display their own result, both companies would have to coordinate with one another.
According to a statement released by Microsoft to The New York Times, “Developing an appropriate system is taking us some time. We expect to launch a form through which users can make requests soon.” We expect that Microsoft is getting themselves ready for Bing users to start demanding a similar service from Microsoft, after seeing what Google is offering its own users.
While it is unclear how Microsoft’s system will work, it is expected to be similar to Google, in which the person filing the request has to provide the links, the reasons they want them removed, and to provide photo identification. Now we should note that while the links will be removed from search, they will still exist on the internet, so one can’t be truly forgotten. However it will make them a little bit harder to find.
Filed in . Read more about Bing (Microsoft), Legal and Microsoft.