How You Can Ask Google to Take Down Your Personal Information And Data?
European Data Protection law has enabled people to force Google to take down their personal information. This is obviously something that Google is not happy about but they don’t have any choice.
information and thus force google to take down your personal information from its search results. This Law( European Data Protection law) currently works in 28 European Countries and 4 other countries Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
The form asks a lot of information from the request maker, making sure that the request is legit. The form requires a copy of a valid form of photo ID. The form starts with following details:
A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.
In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.
If you have a removal request, please fill out the form below. Please note that this form is an initial effort. We look forward to working closely with data protection authorities and others over the coming months as we refine our approach.
Image Showing the Complete form :
I personally feel that the form asks too much information. Check this form and let me know, what you think about it.
What happens after Submission of Form
Once you submit a form, you get below given message:
Hi,
Thanks for reaching out to us!
We have received your legal request. We are currently building our system for removing links from our search results according to EU data protection law. In the meantime, your message is in our queue. Once we have our system up and running, we’ll process your request as quickly as our workload permits.
Regards, The Google Team
Currently, Google shows a notice at the bottom of its results and thus tells users about the deleted result. See below given screenshot:
Does this Law Works for Yahoo and Bing as well?
This rule is not just Google-specific. Any search engine which works in EU must follow the guidelines of this rule. Both Yahoo and Bing also follows the same. Yahoo says:
In light of the European Court of Justice decision, our team is currently in the process of developing a solution for Yahoo users in Europe that we believe balances the important privacy and freedom of expression interests.
Lets see what bing says:
Given the complexity of the ruling and the questions that remain about how it will implemented, it’s really too early to speculate on its impact on Google or anyone else for that matter. We remain hopeful that the courts and data protection authorities will strike the right balance between protecting privacy rights and the freedom of expression.
What kind of Materials can be Removed?
In the first day, more than 12000 people submitted their request using this form. Some of these requests leaked out as well. Out of all requests, majority were related to fraud, scam incident, arrests for violent crime, child pornography, arrests etc
