Infographic: The impact of the right to be forgotten on the press

Google’s right to be forgotten: What impact on the press?

With over 21,000 registrations in less than 3 months on Forget.me, Semji was able to define the typology of websites affected by the right to be forgotten. How does Google respond to requests concerning news sites, Wikipedia, or social networks? Which types of sites are the most requested? Which domain names are the most frequent?

To answer these questions, Semji conducted a study based on 10,787 URLs submitted to Google via Forget.me across 3 European countries: France, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Breakdown of URLs by type of website

We notice that the press is very rarely affected by right to be forgotten requests; in fact, this category represents only 3.6% of requests. The same goes for Wikipedia, which is affected by 0.2% of requests.

Requests are concentrated on other types of sites. In fact, 1/4 of requests concern social networks and blogs. This is often explained by a poor knowledge of privacy settings, posts people regret, or defamation between private individuals.

Directories still account for more than 14% of requests. These are people who do not want private information, such as their address or phone number, published on the internet.

Percentage of deindexed URLs, by type of website

Only 0.3% of URLs in the News sites category are deindexed. Wikipedia, for its part, is not affected by any deindexing. For the social networks category, the figure reaches 8.4%, but only 1.2% for blogs.

Top 5 domain names affected, by type of website

*google.com = google + / google groups / google product forum / Picasa / google profile

Position of URLs by Google page: page 1, 2, 3 and beyond

Bertrand Girin, president of Semji, had raised the importance of this information when he was invited to Google’s Advisory Committee this past September 25, in Paris: “most people do not want the information to be completely removed; what bothers them is that it is on the first page […] it would be interesting to have the average position of URLs when people make a request on their first and last name”

We can note that 3/4 of the URLs affected by a deindexing request are on the first 3 pages of Google’s search results.

*Of the 10,787 URLs in this study, 891 URLs were added manually by Forget.me users, an action that prevents us from knowing their position on Google. This is why they are not included in the following calculation.

Methodology

To conduct our study on news sites, we used the information press sites listed on Wikipedia for France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, which can be viewed here:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presse_en_France

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_Zeitungen