How do you remove any negative information about you from Google Search? Ask Google to do it or go to court if they don't listen to your request! A businessman from the UK did it and won his lawsuit against the tech giant.
The man, whose name is not being revealed, spent six months in prison for illegal wiretapping. That was ten years ago, but the fact that news of his conviction could still be circulating on Google bothered him.
Before going to court, he contacted Google and asked the company to remove search results related to his crime, as they were damaging his reputation. However, the company did not do so.
The plaintiff told the court that the content was no longer relevant to today's reality. The court also stated that the crime and information about its punishment are time-barred and that "there is no interest to Google Search users to justify their availability.".
“We work hard to comply with the ‘Right to be forgotten’, but we are careful not to remove search results that exist in the public interest,” Google said in a statement. In any case, the company will have to comply with the court order.
There is another businessman who faced four years in prison ten years ago for a similar case. He also went to court to have this information removed from Google's search engine, but lost the case. The court said that the plaintiff did not admit his guilt and continued to mislead people, while the other "showed remorse.".
The Right to be forgotten was put into effect by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2014. Since then, companies like Google and Facebook have processed tens of thousands of such requests.
It is unclear what the consequences of such court rulings would be. These cases may also encourage other former prisoners to request that their information be removed from the Internet. It may sound simple, but removing search results is not an easy task.
