Microsoft accepting Europe's 'right to be forgotten' requests

BRUSSELS, July 17 (UPI) -- Microsoft's search engine Bing as started accepting "right to be forgotten" requests from European users, following a ruling by the Court of Justice in May.

Microsoft has asked European users to fill out a four-part form that asks for their name, country of residence and details of the page they would like blocked. The form also asks if the user is a public figure or expected to be in a position of trust, leadership or safety.

The move comes after the Court of Justice of the European Union rules in May that users had the right to be forgotten and could request search engines to remove their name and links from search results. The search engine has the right to evaluate these requests and reject them as well, but rejections can be challenged in court.

Microsoft said that not all requests will be honored and that it will use other sources to verify the information that is provided in the forms.

In a meeting next week, European Union privacy watchdogs plan to address a few issues they have with the implementation of the court's ruling. Primary is their opposition to links being removed only from the European pages of the search engines. Google has said that it will remove the links from google.fr and google.co.uk but not from their main page, google.com.

"It's a problem we've clearly identified," said Gwendal Le Grand, director of technology and innovation at French watchdog Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés. "It puts the effectiveness of the entire decision in question."

Another contentious issue is Google's practice of informing sites whose links have been removed, without naming the person in question. Some of these disclosures have been made public and also made it possible to identify the person making the request, leading to news stories about the person in question, bringing even more attention to them.

"The current implementation process partly undermines the right to be forgotten," said Johannes Caspar, head of the Hamburg data-protection regulator, which is the lead privacy regulator for Google in Germany.