Britons Request 'Right to be Forgotten' by Google

Britons requested that Google wipe more than 60,000 links from search results under European "right to be forgotten laws", the web giant revealed.

It said that in total 498,737 links from search results were considered for removal since May this year, following 145,644 requests from European countries.

The third highest number of requests came from the UK, with 18,304 requests to remove data.

A European Court of Justice ruling earlier this year means that irrelevant or old data should be removed from search engines on request.

Critics of the legislation argue that it constitutes censorship of information in the public sphere.

As part of the transparency report, Google provided examples of the requests from the UK it had turned down.

Google says 'no'

One was a request from a "media professional" to remove links to articles reporting embarrassing content he had posted online. The request was denied.

Another was from a public official who "asked us to remove a link to a student organisation's petition demanding his removal. We did not remove the page from search results".

An individual who requested that articles reporting his dismissal for sexual crimes committed while at work also had his request for the links to be erased denied.

A doctor requested that more than 50 links to articles reporting as botched procedure be removed. While three articles that did not mention the procedure were removed, the rest were not.

Some links were removed under national, rather than EU laws.

"A man asked that we remove a link to a news summary of a local magistrate's decisions that included the man's guilty verdict. Under the UK Rehabilitation of Offenders Act this conviction has been spent. The pages have been removed from search results for his name," says the report.

It said that 3,353 links to Facebook had been removed, and 2,397 from YouTube.