Brussels, 28/07/2014 (Agence Europe) - French internet users form the largest group within the EU calling for some of their personal data to be deleted uinder the ruling of the Court of 13 May of this year on the right to be forgotten (see EUROPE 11078), the Article 29 group of national data protection regulators stated, following a meeting on 24 July with representatives of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.
With 17,500 requests, French people asked Google for the most partial de-referencing of webpages containing their personal information. German (16,500) and British (12,000) Internet users followed.
Google has already examined 91,000 requests for deletion, concerning a total of 328,000 links. It has undertaken to agree to more than half of the requests, leading to a total of more than 150,000 links being partially withdrawn from the search engine. On the other hand, 39% of the requests were turned down and additional information was requested from the internet users for the remaining 15%, according to figures reported in various media sources.
Following the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the right to be forgotten, the G29 met representatives of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! in Brussels on 24 July, to ask them about their practical implementation of the key principles of the judgment. The Article 29 group is to prepare guidelines for the autumn, to allow the European protection authorities to deal in a coordinated way with complaints from individuals, who may bring the matter to them in the event that they receive a negative responset from the search engines to their request to de-referencing. These guidelines will also stipulate how the search engines should respond to requests, so as to guarantee a consistent and uniform application of the decision at European level.
During the meeting, a number of questions were put to the search engines. These mainly had to do with the details of the de-referencing (territorial scope of the ruling, specific reasons for which general public interest in accessing specific information is to be seen as a key factor, notification of the de-referencing to the sites, justification for turning down requests). The European authorities also asked the search engines to answer a number of questions in writing by the end of July. (SP)