"And lack of awareness may not be the only reason for the apparently low number of appeals, said Martin Husovec, a Slovak-born assistant professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society in the Netherlands.
"We should surely not assume that all the requests sent to Google are legitimate. It makes perfect sense that the number of follow-up requests is significantly lower, because applying to a state authority forces a citizen to think twice [about] whether his or her situation is really in need of this kind of strong remedy", he wrote in an e-mailed response.
Husovec noted that lack of awareness and "a fear of bringing a personal matter to an official forum" may also play a role, as well as the lack of uncertainty of the scope of what has become known as the "right to be forgotten", but is actually a right to be "delisted" from search engine results."
- Date Published:10/12/2015
- Original Publication:EUobserver