After all, not everything that ends up on the internet stays on the internet.

Thanks to the "right to be forgotten" policy , it is possible to remove information from search engine results.

However, the Portuguese are among the European citizens who request the "right to be forgotten" the least.

The revelation was made by cybersecurity company Surfshark.

The "right to be forgotten" allows individuals to ask websites to remove queries related to their name from the results pages of European search engines.

2015 marked the first full year that the policy was in force.

This law applies to countries covered by the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), members of the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA) and other European countries that have adopted similar laws, such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

The study ranks 32 European countries that submitted "right to be forgotten" requests to Google and Microsoft Bing, excluding countries that sent requests to one company but not the other, such as Russia.

The "right to be forgotten" has been exercised in the EU and other countries, resulting in the removal of 6 billion URLs from Google alone.

During this period in which the directive has been in force, social networking sites have been the most common targets, with Facebook being the most prominent, Surfshark points out in the statement.

Portuguese make little use of the law

In Portugal, around 1,200 "right to be forgotten" requests were submitted in 2022, compared to around 1,900 in 2021.

According to this analysis, in 2022 around 155,000 "right to be forgotten" requests were submitted to Google and Bing, a decrease of almost 20% on the previous year and marking the first decline since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

Of the 32 countries analyzed in 2022, 28 showed a decrease in requests, the cybersecurity company points out.

Some countries had far fewer "right to be forgotten" requests, indicating a potential lack of information and awareness about the issue, Surfshark said in a statement, adding that the vast majority of requests were submitted to Google.

In 2022, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Czechia and Slovakia submitted less than one "right to be forgotten" request per 10,000 people. Poland, Portugal and Greece submitted around one request per 10,000 people.

In contrast, France, Germany and the United Kingdom accounted for more than 50% of all "right to be forgotten" requests.

Germany and the United Kingdom were in 2nd and 3rd place, with 24,000 and 16,000 requests, followed by Italy and Spain, in 4th and 5th place, with 12,000 and 11,000 requests.

"The data shows that interest in the 'right to be forgotten' has stabilized in recent years. Interestingly, Western countries are the most active in filing 'right to be forgotten' requests. However, there seems to be a lack of involvement or awareness regarding the advantages offered by the GDPR among the rest of the European nations," said Lina Survila, spokesperson for Surfshark, quoted in the press release.

"Raising public understanding of these initiatives emphasizes the GDPR's role as a catalyst for protecting digital rights and improving privacy on a global scale," he added.