Google has launched a service to allow Europeans to ask for personal data to be removed from online search results.
The move comes after a landmark European Union court ruling earlier this month, which gave people the “right to be forgotten”.
Links to “irrelevant” and outdated data should be erased on request, it said.
Google said it would assess each request and balance “privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information”.
“When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information,” Google says on the form which applicants must fill in.
Google said it would look at information about “financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials” while deciding on the request.
Google said information would start to be removed from mid-June and any results affected by the removal process would be flagged to searchers.
Decisions about data removal would be made by people rather than the algorithms that govern almost every other part of Google’s search system.
Disagreements about whether information should be removed or not will be overseen by national data protection agencies.
Europe’s data regulators are scheduled to meet on 3-4 June. The “right to forget” will be discussed at that gathering and could result in a statement about how those watchdogs will handle appeals.
Information will only disappear from searches made in Europe. Queries piped through its sites outside the region will still show the contested data.
On 13 May, the EU’s court of justice ruled that links to “irrelevant” and outdated data on search engines should be erased on request.
