The articles are still online on websites such as Independent.ie, but cannot be easily searched using Google’s search engine. This effectively renders the articles invisible to most internet users.

This delisting purge was done at the request of the Quinn family under the EU’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ law.

But how exactly does this process work? Who, in Google, decides whether a news article on Sean Quinn is worthy enough of public interest to be protected from Mr Quinn’s ‘right to be forgotten’ delisting request under European privacy law?

Here’s a basic explainer on how the ‘right to be forgotten’ process works within Google and who decides what.

1. The people within Google who decide

Google has a team called the legal removals team. It deals with various requests and issues, from copyright to data privacy and right-to-be-forgotten (RTBF) requests.

When an RTBF web form is filled out, a person — rather than an algorithm — sees it. In many cases, it’s decided there or then based on precedent or substance. Sometimes it’s escalated, such as if there’s a legal case involved or a Data Protection Authority request from the likes of Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner. This escalation might be to an in-house Google lawyer for adjudication.

A number of those cases then escalate to an even higher level within the company, all the way to senior legal executives for a view and a decision. Google’s top executive in this area is David Price, the company’s legal director. The American executive lives and works in London, partly to handle EU-related legal and privacy issues.

2. Factors that influence Google’s decision process

(i) The amount of time that has passed since an article was published is a main factor that, Google says, informs its decision to decide whether or not to agree to delist a URL. The longer it is since the article was published, the more likely it is to be delisted.

(ii) A change in someone’s circumstances or role also plays a part, the company says. If a former politician, who has left political life, makes a delisting request, Google is open to delisting the link if the item reported on no longer substantively relates to the person’s life today. Similarly, if there’s an article about a well known business person that references a scandal in their personal life, Google may delist it if that scandal is not connected with their activities as a business person (with other provisos on time taken into account).

This isn’t an absolute rule, though: Google says that if the article is about a key role that the person played in an important matter, or about a scandal that is widely referred to or referenced in education or texts, it might then refuse to delist. In such cases, Google makes judgement calls on whether something is important or not based on its own reasoning. This is where much of the debate and controversy arises in cases such as the Sean Quinn case. As we know, there is a permanent 2pc levy on insurance premiums because of the fallout from the issues that arose from Mr Quinn’s business difficulties. Shouldn’t that confer a higher bar on URLs outline circumstances around that case? Google says that it doesn’t get much guidance from authorities on whether something is “important” or not.

(iii) Another influential factor is the involvement of the Data Protection Commissioner. In some cases, a request to delist comes from the Irish DPC on behalf of an individual. Google gives extra weight to these recommendations in deference to the position that the DPC has.

3. Are newspaper articles more protected than other links?

In theory, one test of public interest could be publication by an established mainstream news outlet. Shouldn’t those articles automatically assume a higher barrier of protection against being delisted under ‘right to be forgotten’ law? Not necessarily, says Google. Other factors apply to affect the outcome. For example, a URL of an article might describe a person being charged for an offence they are later acquitted of. The article under the initial URL doesn’t include the information that they’re acquitted and so is incomplete. In that case, with other factors such as passage of time thrown in, Google can decide to delist. Should Google notify newspapers if it’s delisting their URLs? The company says it does, through the newspaper’s Google Search Console account. When a URL is delisted, the webmaster of the newspaper can see that this has happened. This notification has been challenged by some European data protection authorities, who argue that it’s effectively a breach of the personal privacy of the individual who requested the delisting as it brings the matter to the attention of the newspaper.

4. What about people who merely want to scrub their past deeds from the public record?

Google says it is aware of this and rejects what it thinks are attempts to clean up a CV. It also says that its basic mission to maximise access to information is a guiding principle in not just agreeing to every ‘right to be forgotten’ request that comes in.

5. How many Irish news article URLs are actually delisted?

It’s a little more than 600 per year. According to Google, 10,065 requests to delist 41,000 URLs have been made in Ireland since the middle of 2014. Of these, 45pc are described as ‘news’. Independent.ie is the publisher most affected, with 1,492 URLs (articles) delisted. IrishTimes.com is next, with 744 articles delisted, while pressreader.com (which contains articles from most main news publishers) saw 417 article links delisted. Irishexaminer.com had 359 URLs delisted with thejournal.ie affected through 139 URLs delisted.

In the seven and a half years it has been in operation, Google has delisted just under half of the URLs requested from Ireland. 91pc of the requests came from individuals, as opposed to companies, institutions or other organisations.

6. Does Google give any actual examples of its reasoning in delisting Irish news articles?

Only a few. In its ‘transparency report’ (available online), it offers a few cases where it agreed to, or refused, a delisting request.

For example Google refused to delist an article URL about an individual who used a loan from a bank to finance his business and who was then the subject of a summary judgement obtained by a bank regarding the loan. Google says that, despite a request from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to delist the article URLs, it decided not to delist the “given that the requester continues to serve as the principal of the same business”.

On the other hand, Google did delist a news article URL relating to two individuals who were involved in High Court proceedings relating to a series of loans that they used for personal property investments. Again, the Irish DPC had itself concluded that delisting of the news article was appropriate given the investments and debt of these individuals were not related to them in their professional capacity. Google complied with this and delisted the article.