A ruling announced by the European Union allowed the European Citizens to demand Google to forget them and remove their data; the search giant has decided to provide censored search results. The search engine giant said that they are considering placing a button at the bottom of the page to alert the users that data has been removed from there because of the ruling; otherwise users might continue searching for that data. The European Union reached this understanding with Google that the company would have to remove inadequate data and data of no relevance from search results but, would not vanish it completely. Instead, the firm would take steps to allow it to be present on the original page.
Since the ruling, Google has been plagued by requests from people to remove data which they thought should not be shared with the public. The European Court Of Justice announced this ruling on May 13th. Google will provide censored search results and alert the people to remove data because of material that infringes copyrights belonging to various companies. It is also planned by the search engine giant to include data removal requests in its transparency report that it publishes twice a year. The transparency report will also reveal the amount of government requests that are made for the removal of sensitive and confidential data from the search results.
On Monday, Google let out that since the ruling it had received over 41,000 requests to eradicate inadequate data from European Citizens. Larry page, the chief executive at Google stated that out of 41,000 requests received by the web giant, one fifth of the requests were related to crime, a third of the requests were about fraud or scam and 12 percent was related to arrests concerning child pornography. People who wanted data to be removed had to fill a form and explain the reason for which they wanted data to be removed. The search company however, does not have to accept every request but, it has to keep in mind the interests of the public.
To help it make decisions about the data that should be removed and the data that should be kept, Google has set up an advisory council. The committee consists of the executive chairman at Google, Eric Schmidt and Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Wales has stated that the ruling made by the European Union has only caused the search Results to be censored and has caused a ripple of concern as to how would they be able to run news organizations. These organizations have been affected the most because it is Google, through which, people find their way to these pages that provide information. While giving an interview, he further added that he did not consider appropriate information printed in newspapers to be private. Moreover, he said that the ruling would only stop people from asking logical questions. Other than that, nobody should have the right to remove what people have to say.