Firms overwhelmed by right to be forgotten requests
Firms are already overwhelmed by right to be forgotten requests, as a new survey shows many are a long way from compliance with EU data protection legislation.
Nearly half, or 46 per cent, of IT professionals have been asked to remove data in the past year, according to a study from Blancco Technology Group, surveying IT pros across North America, the UK, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and Mexico.
But of these, two in five don’t have either the processes or the technology in place to comply with the right to be forgotten.
Read more: Why the right to be forgotten is bad for business
Under the right to be forgotten, search engines must remove links to unflattering information, allowing individuals to ask for “inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant” material to be taken down.
But some 60 per cent of those polled said it would take their firm up to a year to be ready to perform such an audit, and another 25 per cent don’t know how long it will take.
Under milestone EU-wide data protection legislation, agreed in December after years of negotiations, firms are compelled to disclose attacks, and risk steep sanctions if they fail to adequately protect themselves.