Russia's largest search engine reveals the early results of the ‘right to be forgotten’

Since Russia's new law on the “right to be forgotten” took effect on January 1, 2016, Yandex—Russia's most popular Internet search engine—has received 3,600 takedown requests from 1,348 people. The company says it has complied with 27 percent of these requests, rejecting the rest. 

Yandex says its high rejection rate has to do with the difficulty of verifying information and determining if information violates an individual's rights. As a remedy, Yandex refers many submissions to the courts. (According to the company, 51 percent of all takedown requests have targeted information that is supposedly “accurate but irrelevant”—a category of data that Internet search engines are supposed to remove, if asked, under the new “right to be forgotten.”)

The law also allows individuals to appeal to search engines in any written form, and—for some reason—the “majority” of requests has been submitted in paper letters, creating an enormous burden on the website, whose employees have to transfer the letters manually into electronic form.

Yandex is asking lawmakers to revise the legislation to require a police order for the takedown of “unverified or illegal” information about an individual. The company also wants the law to have a clause protecting information deemed socially relevant, and to let Internet search engines determine the form in which complaints must be filed (eliminating the paper bottleneck).

According to Yandex's report, 30 percent of all takedown requests concerned links to “unverified” information, 25 percent concerned links to information that the individual deemed “no longer relevant,” 23 percent were links to information about expunged criminal records, 19 percent concerned links to information that was allegedly disseminated illegally, and 3 percent were links information about crimes with expired statutes of limitations.