What goes on the Internet stays on the Internet, right? Yes — except for in the European Union now.* Thanks to a recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, Google and other search engines now also are in the business of being caretakers of people’s reputations.

Here’s how it works with Google:

  • Europeans can visit this page to complete a form requesting that search results be de-indexed from Google’s listings.
  • The results must be “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”
  • Google will “assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating the request, Google will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.”
  • A copy of a valid form of photo identification is needed to complete the form, in order to “prevent fraudulent removal requests from people impersonating others, trying to harm competitors, or improperly seeking to suppress legal information.”
  • Lawyers or other authorized agents may submit a request for someone they represent.

Google processes an estimate 90 percent of the searches in the European Union, a 28-nation bloc of more than 500 million people.

*In a USA Today article, Eric Schiffer of Reputation Management Consultants in Irvine, Calif., said, “There’s nothing that you do on the Internet that can truly be erased. Even this Google ruling—it’s the equivalent of destroying a library index card, but the book still exists.”

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