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Google's “Right To Be Forgotten” form receives over 12K submissions on its first day

Google in quandary over how to uphold EU privacy ruling  —  (Reuters) - Google and other internet companies find themselves in a quandary over how to strike a balance between privacy …

Reuters Julia Fioretti

Context & Ripple Effects

Two weeks after Search Engine Land published an early guide to how the EU's right-to-be-forgotten removal requests actually work, the scale of demand is now visible: more than 12,000 submissions hit Google's form on its first day. The pickup was broad — Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Re/code, BGR, The Next Web and SlashGear all carried the story — signaling that the mechanics of complying with the May 2014 EU ruling, not just the ruling itself, has become the story.

The quandary Reuters describes is operational as much as legal: every request forces a human judgment about whether a link violates someone's privacy or serves the public interest, and Google — alongside other internet companies named in the report — has to strike that balance at volume.

First-order effects

  • Google must staff and run a review process for thousands of individual delisting judgments immediately, with each decision weighing privacy against public-interest criteria under the EU ruling.
  • European search users begin seeing a different index than everyone else, as approved requests strip results from EU-facing searches.

Second-order effects

  • Other search operators and web companies covered by the ruling face the same compliance machinery, turning delisting review into a shared industry cost rather than a Google-only burden.
  • Publishers whose pages get delisted lose EU search traffic on specific URLs without their content being taken down anywhere else, creating friction between news organizations and the platforms adjudicating visibility.

Third-order effects

  • If request volumes stay at this level, private companies become the de facto arbiters of individual privacy rights under European law — a role regulators may eventually want to formalize or contest.
  • A two-tier web could harden along jurisdictional lines, with EU users' search results diverging structurally from the rest of the world's depending on how aggressively delisting decisions are applied.

The trend: Search engines are being converted from neutral indexes into adjudicators of personal privacy claims, with EU regulation forcing them to build case-by-case review operations at scale.

Related: Google · EU · How the EU's Right To Be Forgotten works · Google Details Problems With Handling Right to Be Forgotten Requests

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