Buzz
Google has an extensive archive of virtually everything, but you might still have a chance to remove some of those unflattering photos and awkward videos.
buchachon/ThinkstockWhether it's a wild college night caught on YouTube, a breach of privacy beyond our control, or a news story about long-forgotten business matters, many of us have digital traces we wish we could erase. While people might eventually forgive and forget, the Internet never seems to forget, preserving a near-permanent record of both our personal and professional pasts through images, videos, and documents.
Thanks to a 2014 ruling from the European Union's highest court, people in Europe now have the right to be 'forgotten'—or at least request the removal of search results linked to their name [sources: Google, Schechner]. This decision originated from a 2010 case in which a Spanish citizen filed a complaint about outdated links related to his old social security debts that appeared in Google search results for his name in the Spanish version of the site [source: Court of Justice of the European Union].
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that individuals can request that search engines remove search results deemed 'inadequate, irrelevant, outdated, or excessive for the purposes they were originally processed for' [source: Newcomb]. In response, Google created a web form that allows users to submit requests to remove specific search results that appear when their name is queried [sources: Google, Schechner].
Google has not disclosed the technical details of how results are removed, but it has stated that each request is personally reviewed by a 'removals team' to balance the individual's right to privacy with the public's right to access information [sources: Google, Schechner]. Users who wish to have search results removed must specify the exact URL of the item they want removed from their search results [source: Google]. While these documents are removed from specific name-based searches, they remain accessible on the Internet and are not blocked from other unrelated queries.
For instance, in its May 2014 ruling, the ECJ determined that search results for 'Mario Costeja González' should no longer show links to a 1998 real estate auction advertisement in Catalonia, Spain. However, anyone searching for 'real estate auctions in Catalonia' (without the name) could still find the 1998 listing. The results are only scrubbed on Google domains within the European Union, meaning a search for the same name in the United States may still return the unwanted result [sources: Hill, Newcomb, Schechner].
