Wikipedia has showed its displeasure at Europe's 'right to be forgotten' court ruling and has published its first transparency report, revealing the number of requests it has received for content or user data removal.
The Wikimedia Foundation, a non profit organization which operates the site has come forward and revealed all of the entries that had been removed. Wikipedia revealed that Google has notified the company of five removal requests, affecting more than 50 links to its site. It reveals that the organization has received over 304 general content removal requests between July 2012 and June 2014.
"Accurate search results are vanishing in Europe with no public explanation, no real proof, no judicial review, and no appeals process," wrote Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on its blog. "The result is an Internet riddled with memory holes — places where inconvenient information simply disappears."
After the court ruling in May, Google has received over 91,000 requests covering a total of 328,000 links that applicants wanted taken down. Google has set up an online forum where people can request removal of links, and the internet giant has hired dedicated 'removal teams' to assess and approve requests. Google recently revealed that it has approved and processed over 50% of these links.
Google recently revealed the number of requests received, it has received 5500 requests made under Dutch law, 7500 Italian law and 8000 under Spanish laws. Google received 12,000 requests referring to around 44,000 URLs from UK. Germany made 16,500 requests in reference to around 57,000 URLs and France made 17,500 requests referring to about 58,000 URLs. The internet giant revealed that 53 percent of all requests came from Europe, in which 32 percent requests have been denied.
Source: Reuters