Forget.Me Helps You Exercise Your Right To Be Forgotten (By Search Engines)
One of the most notorious ways to launch yourself into stardom is to make something outrageous (or temporarily memorable) and post it online. If it has any potential its viral potential will spread like, well, a virus and your 15 minutes of fame are guaranteed. But what if you went viral by mistake? What if some of your mistakes went viral? What if you want some of your old self removed from the internet? They say that you live forever on the internet, but what if you want to be forgotten? What if you just want to say to people: Forget.Me!
Elephants of Internet
If everything stays on the internet, it is easy to stay updated. With Google, playing detective has taken some “noir” out of it, and any information is easy accessible. But sometimes you want some of the information to be removed. Forget.Me helps you to easily find all your irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate information that is publicly available on Google search results. Want that blog from your high school removed so it does not show along your LinkedIn profile? That is not a problem anymore.
For now, this is only available for European residents, regardless of their nationality. The European Court of Justice ruled in May of 2014 that Google must respect the “right to be forgotten” of private individuals. That means that you can ask Google to remove any kind of irrelevant or outdated information concerning your personal data. Start of this case could be dated back to 2010 when a Spanish national wanted certain national newspaper articles to be removed, so he complained to Spain’s data protection agency.
How It Started And What To Do
It was a case of announcing a real-estate auction of his repossessed home. You could say that this is not such a big deal, however, when you entered his his name in the Google, first two pages were only of that auction. He successfully argued that since that case has been resolved, its digital proof should be erased too, both by publisher and Google. Although this can lead to a slippery slope to all kind of censorship issues, for now the “right to be forgotten” prevailed. So what to do if you want to be forgotten?
To exercize your right, you can go directly to Google support, or if you want some help in legal mumbo jumbo, go to Forget.Me. Backed up by a French company that already has experience in online reputation management is Reputation VIP. It will not only help you to remove information that you want to remove, it will optimise your removal request, keep track of your link removal progress and simplify the whole thing. Each case is then individually assessed at Google and the balance between privacy and right to access the information is considered. That means if you are a criminal, or a part of public sector, your path will be a bit harder than a plain John or Jane Doe.
Be Careful With Information
Although this ruling opens all kind of gray areas, isn’t it natural for information to be forgotten? Since internet is not an organic being, this process must be taken seriously. Form the start, people should be cautious of what they put online, but sometimes your information can be published without your knowledge. What should not be forgotten is the fact that this process will only de-index content from the search engine, so the content will still be on the site.
Although legal and moral geist of this EU ruling are a bit wilby-wobly, Forget.Me is here to help the common (European) man and woman to navigate though this “right to be forgotten”. If you want to cut down your online footprint, now you can with few simple clicks. Don’t want that picture from the drunken party on Ibiza on your friend’s Facebook to be searchable to everyone? Now you have legal right to ask for it.
