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1,489 Danes want to be forgotten by Google

The Local Denmark
The Local Denmark - [email protected]
1,489 Danes want to be forgotten by Google
Europeans asked Google to remove nearly a half million URLs. Screenshot: Google

Nearly 1,500 Danes have taken advantage of the May ruling by the EU Court of Justice that gave Europeans the right to request search engines like Google to remove results about them.

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Google’s latest Transparency Report shows that the American tech giant received 144,907 requests from Europeans to remove certain links from the results that come up when searching their names.
 
Google received a total of 1,489 requests from Denmark that affect 4,448 URLs. Of those requests, Google removed 43.8 percent of the URLs and rejected 56.2 percent of the requests. 
 
Since the ruling, commonly known as the ‘right to be forgotten’, Google has received 146,357 individual requests throughout Europe and has evaluated nearly a half million URLs for removal. Google removed the URLs in 41.8 percent of the requests. 
 
Facebook was the site most affected by the ‘right to be forgotten’, with 3,353 URLs removed from the social media behemoth. 
 
Google’s Transparency Report lists some examples of the types of requests that have come in since the ‘right to be forgotten’ took effect. 
 
“A financial professional asked us to remove more than 10 links to pages reporting on his arrest and conviction for financial crimes. We did not remove the pages from search results,” Google wrote about a case from Switzerland.
 
“A media professional requested that we remove 4 links to articles reporting on embarrassing content he posted to the Internet. We did not remove the pages from search results,” the search giant wrote about a UK case. 
 
“An individual requested that we remove close to 50 links to articles about an embarrassing private exchange that became public. The pages have been removed from search results for his name,” Google said about a German case. 
 
In September, it was reported that a Daily Mail story about Austrian incest rapist Josef Fritzl was removed from search results.
 
Google did not provide specific examples of Danish requests. 
 
The ‘right to be forgotten’ only affects search results made from the European versions of Google. The EU decision came after Spain's data protection agency took on the tech giant over privacy.

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