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Europeans Want Google To Forget Facebook And This Facebook Copycat

This article is more than 9 years old.

When Google released its famed transparency report this month, it included a new category of disclosure: how many 'forget this' requests it has received from European citizens since they were granted the "right to be forgotten" in May. Google included a round-up of the 'most forgotten' sites. Though news organizations have made the most noise about their old articles being pulled from search results, the website being erased most from search results was not the New York Times, the BBC, or the Guardian; it was Facebook, with 3,432 urls of the over 200,000 total urls Google has scrubbed from the European versions of its search engines. Most of the sites in the top ten are people search sites and social networks. It suggests that most of us don't want the Internet to forget official news about us; instead we want to eradicate things that our friends -- or we ourselves -- posted.

In a very close second place to the social networking giant was a site with far less name recognition: The Profile Engine, an Auckland, New Zealand-based site which had 3380 of its pages pulled out of Google circulation. Created in 2007, the Profile Engine calls itself the "world's first social network search engine." For many years, it scraped public information from Facebook and made it searchable on its own site, until Facebook blocked its access to its servers in 2011. Claydon sued Facebook for breach of contract and Facebook sued the kiwi site back for sucking up its data. Claydon claims the suit was settled earlier this year. The Profile Engine's major crime is that it takes information that people once made public on social networking sites and keeps it public, even if they later delete or privatize that information on the given site it was scraped from.

"Profile Engine is designed to permit very complex searches such as 'Someone I met called Dave who has a friend called Sally in the city of Boston and likes Skiing'," writes its creator Chris Claydon, whose own profile on the site includes a link to a LinkedIn page that he seems to have deleted. He says the site has 2.5 million monthly users who use it to meet new people who have similar interests or to track down old friends. Claydon declined an interview by phone but was willing to correspond by email about his site's dubious second-place award. "Firstly I would like to point out that Profile Engine has always followed best practice in processing deletion requests and from day one we have always responded to any genuine request from a profile owner wishing to delete a profile, even if we were not legally obliged to do so," wrote Claydon. He says his deletion process is actually better in that it completely eradicates a profile from the site rather than just removing it from the European version of Google. A site devoted to hating on The Profile Engine complains that Claydon asks those seeking deletion to send a copy of their government id which upsets them given that they never signed up for the site to begin with; still, New Zealand's privacy commissioner gave the process a thumbs up in July. Google also requires proof of identity when people submit a "forget this" request, but people likely trust the search giant more with their id than a site they've never heard of before.

Claydon gets notices from Google when his urls are yanked from search. He hasn't gotten notices from any other search engines complying with Europe's new right. "The vast majority of these requests seem to apply to completely innocuous profiles with no information on them which would be likely to cause embarrassment to the owner," writes Claydon.

According to the New Yorker, Google has "assembled dozens of lawyers, paralegals, and others" to review "right to be forgotten" submissions. In the transparency report, Google includes examples of requests its Forget-Me-Team has honored -- such as an Italian woman who wanted an article about her husband's murder taken out of her results -- and ones it has rejected -- such as a Swiss banker who wanted articles about his financial crimes scrubbed. Claydon thinks they've been duped by people with a vendetta against his site. "Nearly half of all the requests seem to originate from France and we suspect that one or two malicious individuals from France are actually sending a large number of fake deletion requests using photoshopped ID card images, which we suspect are mostly being accepted by Google," writes Claydon. According to Google, the French won the award for most requests for disappearance. (The Italians have the distinction of making the highest number of dubious requests.) "Those same two individuals seem to run a number of websites which exist to disseminate misinformation about profile engine and incite people to submit European court deletion requests without any real reason for doing so."

Ironically, if the right to be forgotten ever comes to New Zealand, I imagine Claydon might like to take advantage of it. A Google of his full name yields many angry websites with allegations about his character and business.

Despite thinking that a cabal is out to get him, Claydon said he didn't think the high number of requests was unusual. "We have the same number of public personal profiles as Facebook itself.... Because Profile Engine is of a similar size to Facebook we would expect to get a similar number of requests so this statistic is not a big surprise," he writes.

He said it hasn't hurt his site's traffic. "The European ruling has not affected our operation in any way," he wrote. "We generally support the approach which Google has taken to the issue."

He points out that Google only hides content from its European sites after all. "The search result will disappear from google.co.uk but not from google.com," he writes. "European users can simply go to google.com to find the result!"

Google says the top ten sites, which also include Google Groups and YouTube, account for 6% of total removal requests or over 30,000 removal requests. But Google has only removed 20,738 links from these sites, as of this writing. So there were at least 10,000 requests for removal from these social networking sites that Google's 'Forget' Team deemed not worthy. No telling what share of the rejects belonged to The Profile Engine.