Europe: growth right to be forgotten (RTBF) requests 2022

In 2022, the "right to be forgotten" or "right to erasure" requests issued to Google and Bing from 34 European countries decreased by 16.2 percent compared to the previous year. In 2020, requests surged by almost 30 percent after the COVID-19 outbreak, with an increase of nearly 30 percent.

Year-on-year growth of right to be forgotten (RTBF) requests submitted to online search platforms in European countries from 2016 to 2022

Characteristic	Year-on-year growth in requests
2022	-16.2%
2021	15.1%
2020	29.5%
2019	-3.8%
2018	-2.3%
2017	-19%
2016	-3.3%

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Release date

March 2024

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Region

Europe

Survey time period

2016 to 2022

Special properties

submitted to Google and Bing from 34 countries

Supplementary notes

Additionally, 2 requests were submitted from Cyprus, considered as Western Asia by the source.

According to the source:

"The ”right to be forgotten” was first established in 2014 and redefined as the “right to erasure” with the GDPR adoption in 2018. Therefore, the right applies to countries covered by GDPR (the EU and the EEA) and some other European countries that have adopted similar laws, like the UK and Switzerland."

"We analyzed 32 countries that submitted “right to be forgotten” requests to Google and Microsoft Bing between 2015 and 2021. Countries that had submitted requests for one company but not the other were excluded from the analysis due to discrepancies in the countries reported by the two companies. For example, while Russia’s data protection law defines a right similar to GDPR’s “right to erasure,” only Microsoft reports on Russian requests. Excluding the countries present in one data set but not the other left us with a list of EU and EEA countries and the UK and Switzerland, which have also enforced regulations analogous to GDPR."

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