Sunday, October 1, 2023

Google Delists Over 48,000 Facebook URLs After Europe’s New Privacy Guidelines

Europe is often at the forefront of user privacy because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up protecting its citizens from companies that want to use their data for profit. In an analysis conducted by Surfshark, it was revealed that Facebook turned out to be the most widely delisted site of all, with Google removing approximately 48,600 URLs from that site across 29 of the 31 countries that were studied.

In spite of the fact that this is the case, other social media platforms and major websites faced a similarly widespread spate of delistings with all things having been considered and taken into account. All in all, 100,000 pages were delisted from Google’s SERP, and while nearly half of them belonged to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were also hit pretty hard.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Europe’s new right to be forgotten law might be at the heart of these goings on. Germany and France were the strictest nations of all in enforcing this new regulation, delisting 20k URLs each. They’re followed by the UK where 13,000 URLs ended up getting delisted, indicating that many European nations are wasting no time before adhering to the policy guidelines that have been set by the European parliament.

One way to look at this data is to compare the number of delisted URLs based on the average population of the country in question. If we were to focus solely on this metric, the Netherlands comes out on top. 57 URLs were delisted for every 100,000 people living in the Netherlands, which is the highest proportional URL removal by far.

While most major tech sites are getting delisted, their overall rate of delisting is lower than average. 40% of the top three sites faced delisting, which seems to suggest that they are being given at least a little bit of leeway that would allow them to survive more easily than might have been the case otherwise in the future.


Read next: This Study Reveals What News Sources Americans Trust the Most
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

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