Google Has Received More Than 2 Million 'Right to be Forgotten' Requests

Feeling paranoid about online surveillance? You might be like the millions of people in Europe taking advantage of the European Union's "Right to Be Forgotten" law, which allows EU citizens to ask search engines to "delist" information about themselves from search results.

This law was first applied to search engines in 2014 and Google has complied in the following years. The tech giant initially fought this law before it passed, according to Gawker.

Google released an update to its annual transparency report on Monday, and in that update is a lot of data. Between 2014 and 2017, Google received about 2.4 million delist requests but only complied with 43 percent of them. The majority of these requests came from individuals, but a small amount came from reputation-fixing firms that filed requests on behalf of clients.

What kind of information did citizens want to be scrubbed from search? A third of requests pertained to personal information like social media histories, while another fifth of requests pertained to a person's legal history.

And while a majority of requests came from private individuals and minors, 21 percent came from government officials and politicians.