Google, which has never been fond of privacy, is being forced to adapt to European Union privacy law. According to Fortune, the tech giant received 655,000 requests to remove a total of 2.5 million links from the site's search results.
These requests came about because of a landmark ruling by a European Court of Justice in May 2014, which established a "right to be forgotten." In other words, Google must remove requested links about a particular person if that person says so—more like a "right to be delisted." Additionally, the information can be removed if it is deemed "inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive."
What kind of information do users want removed, anyway? A majority—a third of all requests—were related to social media profiles and people finder websites, which publish personal information like phone numbers and home addresses. A fifth of requests were related to news stories, many of which revealed the requestor's legal (and potentially criminal) background.
Google announced these findings in their recent Transparency Report, which was linked to in a company blog post this past Monday.
Of course, this policy only applies to those in the EU and not anywhere else in the world, at least for now. This is good news for a company that apparently really hates digital privacy. In the past, Google has claimed user privacy is worth $25 and Gmail users don't have legitimate privacy concerns. Additionally, the company has circumvented Microsoft to track Internet Explorer users.
But, of course, Google is certainly not alone in violating your privacy.
