It looks like a long road toward privacy compliance for Google and other search engine companies.

According to an article published earlier this week by The Telegraph, Google is already being flooded by requests to take down controversial or objectionable content, all because of a European Union court that said individuals have “the right to be forgotten.” The European Court of Justice passed down the ruling, stating that search engines would be forced to take down links deemed “inaccurate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant.” In other words, people in EU countries can now make requests for Google and other search engines to remove links about them from Internet search results. Failure to comply with valid requests can result in a fine for the search engine company in question.

Already, Google has been flooded with requests from individuals who want their personal information removed from the web. Of course, Google cannot freely delete content from around the web, but the EU ruling says that the search engine has a responsibility to remove no longer relevant information from its search results because that information can tarnish reputations and infringe upon privacy. Google thinks that removing links to legally published content is censorship; the European Union disagrees.

Currently, Google is trying to figure out a way to handle all of the data removal requests. The company will likely have to set up a complete department to handle the influx of requests that is likely to come from all over the European Union. In short, this ruling will create a huge hassle for Google, and one that will not have any obvious end in sight. Google could be dealing with a steady stream of removal requests for years.

For how much trouble this case is going to cause for Google and other search engines, it is almost remarkable that it all arose because of one man and his complaint to a Spanish data protection agency. The man in question was upset when he found stories about him on the web dating back to 1998, when his house was auctioned off to handle social security debts.

Since the newspaper that had published the stories had done so legally, the complaint against them was invalid. However, the Spanish data protection agency decided to go after Google instead for making the stories readily available. Now that the European Court of Justice has defended the man’s “right to be forgotten,” countless other citizens will undoubtedly target Google in similar fashion.