Google Starts Erasing Links for Searches in Europe
2014-07-04 09:27 by Daniela
Two months ago, a European court told Google it must assist people in cleaning up their online reputations by ruling that there is a "right to be forgotten." Now, Google's removal of search results in Europe is drawing accusations of press censorship, as stories from some of the continent's most prominent news outlets vanishes. The search engine giant said Thursday it is getting 1,000 requests a day to scrub results. At least three British media organizations, including the Guardian newspaper and public broadcaster BBC, said Google notified them search results in Europe would not contain some links to their publications. That deletions from Google's search results could cause such a stir - after all, the articles continue to appear on the websites that published them, and can still be easily found if a searcher sidesteps the European versions of Google and uses the United States version, Google.com - speaks to the vast influence of this particular search engine. By some estimates, Google has about an 85 percent share of search traffic in Europe. In North America, that figure stands at less than 70 percent.
"It's not yet really clear what the magnitude of this is," cautioned Joel Reidenberg of Fordham University, currently a visiting professor at Princeton University. "Google may be choosing to go overboard to essentially create a debate about censorship."
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