The Right to Erasure, sometimes called the Right to be Forgotten, was established in a 2014 Court of Justice of the European Union decision, Google Spain v. AEPD and Mario Costeja González. It grants individuals the ability to request that search engines de-index or delist content about them. We believe in a Right to Remember. Everyone should have free access to relevant and neutral information; search engine delistings harm our collective ability to remember history and understand the world. In October 2016, we filed a petition to intervene in Google’s appeal of a French administrative order that would expand such delistings from the European Union to all global domains. Despite the fact that the projects are not search engines, we occasionally receive direct requests to remove content from Wikimedia projects under the Right To Erasure.*
* Please note that this information only reflects requests made directly to us. Wikimedia project pages continue to disappear from search engine results without any notice, much less, request to us. We have a dedicated page where we post the notices about attempts to remove links to Wikimedia projects that we have received from the search engines who provide such notices as part of their own commitments to transparency. But we suspect that many search engines are not even giving notice, which we find contrary to core principles of free expression, due process, and transparency.
