The right to be forgotten – is not working that well

The unintended consequences of being forgotten are coming quickly to light. As you might recall, the EU court ruled that Google has to change the search result if an ordinary person asks them to do so. Up until this day, Google has received 70,000 requests from people asking to have content about them to be removed from the search results.

The first outcome is that in many cases the request brings unwanted attention to the person who is asking for the information to be removed. In many instances, the information in question resides on newspapers’ websites. News organizations are now publishing articles about which pages should be forgotten by the search engines. In addition, there is a website, which lists the pages which were delisted from the search engine – http://hiddenfromgoogle.com.

On top of that, the ruling only affects the searches going through the European version of Google. It is as simple as going to google.com to see unfiltered results. All in all, this exercise was useless. The court case should have never gone through and the ruling was doomed, as there is no practical solution to achieve the outcome.