Nearly 350,000 Europeans have asked Google to 'forget' them

Eighteen months after the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines may be required to remove links to websites containing sensitive personal data from their search results, 348,085 Europeans have filed such a request with Google.

The highest number of requests came from France and Germany, Google reports, with 73,399 and 60,198 applications, respectively. In Belgium, there were 10,121 applications in the same period.

Google claims to have scrapped 42% of the total 1.2 million links it was asked to remove.