Google Refuses Over 70% of Croatia’s Search Removal Requests

Earlier this year the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that individuals have the right to ask search engines like Google to remove certain results about them…

The court decided in a ruling in the Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González case, that search engines must assess each individual’s request for removal and that a search engine can only continue to display certain results where there is a public interest in doing so. Since the end of May this year individuals could send in their deletion request, with Google receiving over 12,000 in the first day alone.

Google have published details of requests in its Transparency Report, which shows that out of the 146,357 requests to remove 498,737 URL’s from the European Union, Google has removed 41% of the requests. The reports details examples of some requests, such as a woman in Italy who wanted a URL address to an article about her murdering her husband a few decades ago removed, which they accepted. Google also approved requests and removed URL’s to articles where victims of rapes were named in Germany, whilst they refused to remove URL’s which related to articles about financial crimes in Switzerland.

Croatians asked Google to remove 4,765 links, with Google refusing 74.2% of them.