One key trend to pay close attention to in 2015 is the so-called “right to be forgotten.”
The concept burst into public consciousness in May when the European Union Court of Justice ruled in the case of a Spanish citizen who sought to have a link to a newspaper article containing unflattering facts about him removed from Google searches of his name. The court ruled that search engines qualified as a data aggregators, which meant that individuals could exert control over the data within them—i.e. search results. To date, almost 200,000 EU citizens have requested Google, Bing and other search engines remove particular links from search results of their names – but critically, only in the EU versions of Google, such as google.es.