Five Years of the Right to be Forgotten

Abstract

The "Right to be Forgotten" is a privacy ruling that enables Europeans to delist certain URLs appearing in search results related to their name. In order to illuminate the effect this ruling has on information access, we conducted a retrospective measurement study of 3.2 million URLs that were requested for delisting from Google Search over five years. Our analysis reveals the countries and anonymized parties generating the largest volume of requests (just 1,000 requesters generated 16% of requests); the news, government, social media, and directory sites most frequently targeted for delisting (17% of removals relate to a requester's legal history including crimes and wrongdoing); and the prevalence of extraterritorial requests. Our results dramatically increase transparency around the Right to be Forgotten and reveal the complexity of weighing personal privacy against public interest when resolving multi-party privacy conflicts that occur across the Internet. The results of our investigation have since been added to Google's transparency report. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy;

GDPR Anti-Patterns: How Design and Operation of Modern Cloud-scale Systems Conflict with GDPR

“…The latter approach provides opportunities for cross-layer optimizations (e.g., avoiding access control in multiple layers). Google search's implementation [9] of Right to be forgotten is in this direction.…”

Children and the ‘Right to be Forgotten’: what the right to erasure means for European children, and why Australian children should be afforded a similar right

“…Although the right to erasure in the GDPR is not an entirely new invention, having existed in European data protection law for over 20 years (Bunn, 2015: 348; Directive, 1995, Article 12(b); Mayer-Schönberger, 2014) the GDPR is ‘more explicit as to the grounds upon which a data subject can call for the erasure of data, and extends the grounds by allowing a data subject to call for erasure upon the withdrawal of consent’ (Bunn, 2015: 349). The publicity that has been given to the right to erasure since the Google ruling has meant that what was previously a little utilised right (Mayer-Schönberger, 2014) has since given rise to requests to remove 2.4 million URLs, just over 5% of which have been advanced by (or on behalf of) children (Bertram et al, 2018: 2). Of those requests nearly 80% were successful in achieving delisting, almost double the rate of other private individuals (Bertram et al, 2018: 7).…”

“…The publicity that has been given to the right to erasure since the Google ruling has meant that what was previously a little utilised right (Mayer-Schönberger, 2014) has since given rise to requests to remove 2.4 million URLs, just over 5% of which have been advanced by (or on behalf of) children (Bertram et al, 2018: 2). Of those requests nearly 80% were successful in achieving delisting, almost double the rate of other private individuals (Bertram et al, 2018: 7). Another benefit of the right to erasure in providing children with more control than they currently have is that data controllers are required to facilitate the exercise by data subjects of their rights, including by establishing means for electronic requests for erasure of data to be made (GDPR, Recital 59).…”

“… 5. A recent report compiled by authors associated with Google has thrown some light onto how the balancing process has been conducted within that organisation since the Google ruling (see Bertram et al, 2018). …”

Exposing Query Identification for Search Transparency

“…Biega et al [4] argued that exposing queries are an important privacy tool in search systems, demonstrating a range of scenarios where exposure to sensitive queries is problematic [26]. The right to be forgotten [3] is one of the key data protection rights: Knowledge of exposing queries might enable users to execute this right more precisely than removing themselves from search results completely. Content creators could furthermore use the exposure transparency to aid in improving the performance of their documents in search results [28,36].…”