Mr Branding: More Than One Million Right-To-Be-Forgotten Requests Were Submitted To Google And Microsoft Bing

Friday, March 10, 2023

More Than One Million Right-To-Be-Forgotten Requests Were Submitted To Google And Microsoft Bing

There are a leading number of marketers in the US who are working hard to figure out what is the impact of measures related to the ‘right to be forgotten’ in terms of state laws. And on that note, experts feel the best way to go about the situation is by glancing over results from Europe.

As per recent statistics, more than one million right-to-be-forgotten requests from consumers ended up getting submitted to leading search engines. Both Google and Microsoft Bing received them from the years 2015 to 2021. And around 95.8% of them went to Google.

GDPR failed to take that into account till the year 2016, as per a study conducted by Surfshark.

They revealed how the total volume of requests generated grew during the period of the pandemic from a staggering value of 124.5k during the period before the pandemic in 2019 to around 161.3 k in the likes of 2020 and then around 185k by 2021.

Now as far as which European nations led the pack, well, France was definitely the leader in this regard. Research showed how nearly one out of the four requests arose through the likes of the French nation, giving a staggering 255 requests.

Then came Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. After that, we had the likes of Poland and Sweden, followed up by Belgium and Switzerland.

In terms of request density, it was Estonia that was winning where 53 requests arose from 10,000 individuals while other nations had an average of just 20.

Now, the fastest growing nations in this manner were the likes of Cyprus and Portugal which ended up submitting around three times as many requests in the year 2020 than what was seen in the year 2019. Similarly, places like Iceland, Luxembourg, and even Greece ended up doubling the requests YoY.

But what could be the reason behind this in the first place? Well, it might have to do with the pandemic that arose, as mentioned by Surfshark’s privacy counsel.

They continued to reveal how so many daily activities were soon turning into a more virtual endeavor and that is what encouraged people to get super conscious of the world linked to digital hygiene. Moreover, people started to talk about privacy online and the features linked to it.

And in the same way, we saw the GDPR be enforced and that is what made sure more and more people were sticking to privacy measures as a human right that’s practiced until today.