Bing puts ‘right to be forgotten’ form online

Microsoft’s search engine Bing has put a form online with which Europeans can submit a request to remove search results. The search engine is obliged to do this following a recent ruling by a European court on the ‘right to be forgotten’.

The form asks Europeans for personal information and a motivation as to why Bing should remove a particular link from search results. In doing so, Microsoft appears to be complying with a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ruled that European citizens have the right to be forgotten by search engines. Search engines must therefore remove individual links upon request.

Google has been complying with the ruling for several weeks and says that 70,000 people have now submitted requests to ban a total of a quarter of a million pages from the search engine. Google does not remove the page from its own index; the results can still be found in variants of Google outside Europe. The pages are also still online, although Google webmasters receive a message about the removal from the search results.