SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Google on Friday said it has received more than 70,000 “right-to-be-forgotten” requests in Europe, including from politicians and “serious, violent” criminals demanding the deletion of unflattering content from search results.

Google stressed it was trying to comply with a European court’s controversial order, even as it painted the controversial decision as illogical, even wrong.

“The European Court found that people have the right to ask for information to be removed from search results that include their names if it is ‘inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive,’” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post.

That means a newspaper, like The Guardian in London “could have an article on its website about an individual that’s perfectly legal, but we might not legally be able to show links to it in our results when you search for that person’s name,” he added.

“It’s a bit like saying the book can stay in the library, it just cannot be included in the library’s card catalogue,” Drummond said.

Still, the Google executive said “we obviously respect the court’s authority and are doing our very best to comply quickly and responsibly.”

The take-down requests Google has received since May cover 250,000 Web pages, and the company has “a team of people individually reviewing each application, in most cases with limited information and almost no context.”

Some of the requests “highlight the difficult value judgments search engines and European society now face,” he added.

They include former politicians asking posts critical of their policies to be removed from search results and “serious, violent criminals” who want articles about what they did to be removed.

Professionals, like architects and teachers, have also demanded the removal of “bad reviews,” while others simply want to erase comments they wrote “and now regret,” he said.

The process has become so complex that Google has at times made mistakes, Drummond said, acknowledging that “we incorrectly removed links to some articles last week” although these were later reinstated.

The Guardian newspaper referred to that admission, saying Thursday that it was one of the first publications to be notified by Google that some of its content had been removed from the search giant’s results. Some of the articles were subsequently reinstated in search results, the paper said.

Drummond also said Google was sympathetic to some requests, including one from a man “who asked that we not show a news article saying he had been questioned in connection with a crime,” since he was able to show that he was never charged. He also pointed to the case of woman “who requested that we remove news articles for her daughter’s name as she had been the victim of abuse.”

“It’s a complex issue, with no easy answers,” he added. “So a robust debate is both welcome and necessary, as, on this issue at least, no search engine has an instant or perfect answer.”

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