Europeans flock to be forgotten

More than 250 Europeans a day have been applying to a French website to have past incidents "forgotten" by Google since the service was launched. Called forget.me, the site allows European Union residents to apply to have material removed from Google's European Union search results.

The French firm, ReputationVIP, appears to be the first to take advantage of a groundbreaking Europe's high court ruling on May 13. Under European privacy laws, the court ruled, individuals have the right to request search engines remove links to information about them that is "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed."

As of June 30, 2014, 13,000 people had registered on the company's website. They submitted 1,105 right to be forgotten applications requesting the remove of a total of 5,418 links, according to Bertrand Girin, the Lyon, France-based reputation management firm's chief executive officer.