Why do people exercise their "right to be forgotten" by Google? The website Forget Me, which launched last week and offers users a submission service to Google with templated forms that tick all the search engine's legal boxes, has released a breakdown of its customer's motivations.
Invasion of privacy accounted for 306 of the 1,106 submissions that Forget Me filed to Google as of Tuesday, with disclosure of home address the largest subcategory (66 submissions). "Negative opinions", "redundancy" and "origin, nationality or ethnic identity" follow. Sexual orientation appears way down the list of privacy-related reasons for removing web pages, below disclosure of income and philosophical belief. Forget Me's sample of just over 1,000 submissions represents a small percentage of the 40,000-plus requests received by Google, but is still large enough to indicate the most pressing concerns.
Of all the forms filed and transferred to Google in the company's first week of operation, 22% – the greatest number of users by nationality – come from the UK, followed by 18% from France (Forget Me's parent company, Reputation VIP, is based in Lyon) and 10% from Germany.
"When you fill in Google's form, you need to indicate the pages you want to suppress but you also need to write a text explaining why the pages are 'irrelevant, outdated or otherwise inappropriate'," says Bertrand Girin, the CEO of Reputation VIP. "The text will be judged by Google on certain criteria – whether the information is obsolete, for instance. These are legal terms. What we wanted to do was create texts that people could understand easily. So we wrote 30 different cases. 'I've been fired by my company and that's a problem because I need to find another job,' for instance. We then asked lawyers to write the texts that correspond to these cases." It is too early to know the company's success rate compared to that of other applicants.
Girin is good-looking, in a charismatic black poloneck. This information appears in visual form on the first page of a Google search on his name. That is the kind of influence Reputation VIP can exercise. (To compare, the first page of a Google search on my name shows a photo of me wearing a maternity dress for a feature dated 2007: that is the kind of influence I exercise.) Forget Me is currently free to use, while subscribers to Reputation VIP pay a monthly fee of between €500 and €300,000.
Forget Me's categories of user and their reasons for wanting to assert their right to privacy are interesting. But, of course, they can only reflect the predetermined "cases" that Girin's team devised: the service can protect your privacy, not your individuality. You might be anonymous, but you'll always be data.
