Mark Scott reports:
Europe likes to think it leads the world in protecting people’s privacy, and that is particularly true for the region’s so-called right to be forgotten. That legal right allows people connected to the Continent to ask the likes of Google to remove links about themselves from online search results, under certain conditions.
Yet that right — one of the world’s most widespread efforts to protect people’s privacy online — may not be as effective as many European policy makers think, according to new research by computer scientists based, in part, at New York University.
The academic team, which also included experts from the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, said that in roughly a third of the cases examined, the researchers were able to discover the names of people who had asked for links to be removed.
Read more on the New York Times.