UK Commissioner Waiting for Complaints on Google

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The UK Commissioner’s Office claimed that they expect to receive complaints from people requesting to remove their name from Google’s search results. Google found itself between the hammer and the anvil, as while the recent court ruling demanded that it remove names from the searches, these moves are criticized by those who claim the company is removing links that are still relevant.

In order to comply with the court ruling over the so-called “right to be forgotten”, the tech giant has implemented a system where individuals can request particular links be removed from searches. Only the search results were altered, the web pages with the information remained. Or at least this was what the company promised.

However, some British users have already complained that Google removed search results that were still relevant. Now the UK’s Commissioner became the arbiter for disputes between search engines and people who want links removed and is expecting other complaints from people seeking to get their names removed from the search results. Although there has been no complaints thus far, the potential is good, based on the sheer volume of requests Google is receiving, (around 1,000 per day across EU). However, the Commissioner clarified that publishers and other third parties won’t be able to complain about it – only the individuals affected by the content of the page.

A few days ago the Guardian complained about the removal of a number of 4-year-old pages from its index via name-based search, and the company had to reinstate them.

The problem is that the removal of links may appear very controversial. For instance, there are worrying members of a pressure group about Collins & Bone, a UK company which 4 years ago was seeking for investors for a business of renovating houses and renting them to students. However, the investigation by the UK government found out that the founders of the company should be disqualified from directorships for a total of 28 years. These were one of the first people to request information about them be removed, and the campaigners who say they were defrauded are afraid that it may soon happen.

As for other search engines operating in Europe, there were not many comments or effort to do what Google is doing. Microsoft’s Bing, for example, didn’t clarify how it was going to deal with such requests from EU citizens.