So Google turned on that "right to be forgotten" removal form this past Friday, and by all accounts it got hammered almost immediately. Word going around yesterday was something like 12,000 requests in the first 24 hours. Twelve thousand. For a web form that basically just went live with zero fanfare beyond a blog post.
Quick backstory if you missed it: the EU's top court ruled a few weeks back that European citizens can ask Google to delist search results about them under certain conditions — old debts, spent convictions, stuff that's technically true but not really relevant anymore and just sitting there attached to their name forever. Google fought this, lost, and had to build the actual mechanism for people to file requests. That mechanism is a pretty barebones form: name, the URLs you want gone, why, and a scan of your ID so they know you're not trying to memory-hole somebody else's past.
I filled one out myself, not because I have anything to hide (well, nothing I'm telling you about), but because I wanted to see the process. Its clunkier than youd expect from Google. You'd think a company that indexes the entire internet could make a form that doesn't feel like renewing your car registration, but nope. Upload a photo ID, describe your grievance in a text box with no character limit guidance, hit submit, and then just wait. No confirmation number. No status page. You just sort of trust it went into a queue somewhere in Mountain View, or Dublin, or wherever they're routing these.
Whats interesting to me isnt really the privacy angle, which every op-ed this week has already chewed to death. Its the sheer logistics of what Google just signed up for. Somebody at that company now has to sit there and make judgment calls about newsworthiness versus privacy, one request at a time, for what's probably going to be hundreds of thousands of these things over the next year. Thats an editorial function. Google has spent a decade insisting its search results are just neutral math, an algorithm doing algorithm things, no human hands on the scale. Now there's a team, presumably actual people with actual job titles, deciding whether a five-year-old bankruptcy notice is still "relevant" enough to stay indexed. That's not math. That's judgment. And judgment is exactly the thing a search engine is supposed to be too big and too automated to need.
I don't think this ends well, honestly. Not because I think people shouldn't get some control over old, irrelevant stuff about them — I get the impulse, I really do. But the form doesn't distinguish between "this is embarrassing" and "this is actually still important for someone else to know." A local paper already flagged that some of what's getting requested for removal is stuff a journalist would call legitimate public interest, not personal minutiae. And Google's the one who has to sort that out now, under threat of fines if European regulators think they got the call wrong. Rough job to inherit on a Friday afternoon.
Separately, and only sort of related: Apple's keynote is in a few hours as I'm typing this, so by the time anyone reads this post the whole internet's attention is going to be somewhere else entirely. Feels like a weird week to be the "delete my search results" story, timing-wise. You launch a form that generates 12,000 filings overnight and it's still going to get buried under whatever Cupertino says on stage today. I have zero inside info on what's coming, for what it's worth, I've just seen the same rumor roundups as everyone else, new OS version numbers, maybe something about a scripting language nobody's names have leaked yet. We'll all know soon enough.
Anyway. If you're in the EU and there's some old forum post from 2003 haunting your search results, apparently now's your chance. Everyone else, we just get to watch how badly this scales.