CHINA TOPIX

11/21/2024 11:43:52 pm

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Microsoft, Yahoo Working On 'Right To Be Forgotten' Requests In Europe

Following Google's lead in Europe, Yahoo and Microsoft will also work on 'right to be forgotten' requests, from users who do not want information showing up on web results.

The right to be forgotten policy was implemented a few months ago, effectively allowing Europeans to remove themselves from search results - Google implemented a new system to work on requests recently - speeding up the process.

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Even though Google runs 90 percent of web searches in Europe, the other ten percent have been a little slower to the party. Yahoo! Search and Microsoft's Bing will now remove search results, for affected users.

Bing started taking requests in July, but is only now starting to work on the requests and actively delete information. Yahoo also offered a way around that time. Numbers for both search engines come just under 1,000.

Compared to Google's 174,000 requests to be forgotten, it is a pretty low number and shows the lack of interest for Bing and Yahoo. Google search is definitely the de-facto in Europe, even in the U.S. we see more prominence from Bing and Yahoo.

The three companies take every case individually and work with laws given to them by the European data protection authorities. Some data requests do not need to be work on and some cannot, due to it being a political/social or other issue that needs to stay public.

Google has shown some annoyance to the whole ordeal, finding most of the requests to be informal requests, due to surveillance scares more than anything else. Google has reportedly worked on 41.5 percent of cases.

European regulators are looking to make Google's right to be forgotten process work globally, effectively removing the person from the Internet. Right now, the removal only works in the local Google area, meaning people in other countries may still see the search result.

Google is also under fire from the European Parliament for using the search engine to promote other services. The parliament has pushed for Google to split the search engine from the rest of the company, but analysts predict nothing will change.

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