securityboulevard.com
Three years of the Right to be Forgotten
The “Right to be Forgotten” is a privacy ruling that enables Europeans to delist certain URLs appearing in search results related to their name. In order to illuminate the effect this ruling has on information access, we conduct a retrospective measurement study of 2.4 million URLs that were requested for delisting from Google Search over the last three and a half years. We analyze the countries and anonymized parties generating the largest volume of requests; the news, government, social media, and directory sites most frequently targeted for delisting; and the prevalence of extraterritorial requests. Our results dramatically increase transparency around the Right to be Forgotten and reveal the complexity of weighing personal privacy against public interest when resolving multi-party privacy conflicts that occur across the Internet.
Elie Bursztein