News. A third party can potentially identify as many as 30% to 40% of delisted URLs and the name of the individual who requested the removal, researchers from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, NYU Shanghai and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, claim based on a data set of 283 articles.
Google does not show an article when a person who successfully requested its removal is named in the article, but it does show the article in response to search terms unrelated to that person’s name. That discrepancy allowed researchers to construct an attack designed to identify delisted URLs without comparing search results for queries submitted to both Google.com and Google.co.uk.
The major flaw in the “right to be forgotten” is that it does not apply to Google.com in the US, where free speech presently enjoys strong legal protection, or in other countries outside of European jurisdiction. France’s data protection authority wants Google to close that loophole.
