Your Arrest Gets Published Online and It's the First Thing That Comes Up When You Google Your Name
In the course of handling a lawsuit against an underage driver who was charged with DUI for civil damages stemming from a bad injury, we Googled the Defendant and one of the top hits was his more recent arrest for Minor in Possession. www.Arrestcentral.com and www.Bustedmugshots.com are two examples of sites that cull readily available arrest information and make it very Google friendly.
This can become a huge problem for you, especially if you have a unique name. If you have a common name, a search on you are your city of residence is likely to return hundreds of responses. But, if you are uniquely named and have an arrest record that has been scraped, odds are that a prospective boss or nosey parent will locate the information.
Can they publish that information? Don't I have privacy rights?
Yes, they can publish any true public information. Yes you have privacy rights, but an arrest record is public and your privacy rights are trumped by the First Amendment rights of the publisher. The same holds true for a newspaper reporting your arrest. So long as they don't cross the line and say that you are guilty, as they did in the Richard Jewell (Olympic Park Bombing Suspect) case.
