The right to be slightly less remembered?

The so-called right to be forgotten saga on search engine results won’t go away. Ironically, this is one legal development that nobody will allow you to forget.

Every day about a thousand requests are made to Google from people all across Europe for information about them to be removed from its massive search engines.

In fact, the right is nothing more than a 'right to be slightly less remembered'.

Yes, Google is the largest search engine; yes, deleting personal information from Google means that it is trickier to find; and yes, this would please many people who want to try to hide any offending information that is held on them. However, the elephant in the room, the existence of which everyone seems desperate to forget, is that the information may still be on other search engines—yes, others do exist—or it may be held in non-digital form somewhere.

Deletion from Google does not mean the right to be 100% forgotten. According to recent market share statistics, it is more a right to be forgotten 89% of the time.

Not quite the same.

What’s more, the information will still exist on the Internet for anybody who has the site address, or URL, to find it. It is only the link, and not the information, that is deleted.

In contrast, the amount of requests that Bing received has been negligible (eg 12 in the first few days after the Google judgment). Individuals may well g