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.
So what can I do about it? You can reach out to the publisher and ask that they remove the listing; in fact www.arrestcentral.com has a "delist me" button. The safest plan is to Google yourself frequently in the months after an arrest and if you pop up, request that the site take you off. The problem with these sites is that they make your full name part of the actual page title which is uber search engine friendly if you have a rare name.
If that won't work, then hire an online identity protection firm to bury the negative posting behind hundreds of spammy hits. Online reputation management is a burgeoning industry and these players are only to happy to step in and help a brother out; for a small fee, of course.
If you are broke then start claiming your identity with your name prominently listed on every free platform out there including Blogger, Linkedin, Facebook etc. The more listings with your full name that you create, the farther down the list the arrest should eventually be pushed.
Anyway you slice it you can be guilty until not listed by Google on page one anymore! There are wonderful things about the information age, but online arrest records are certainly one of the downsides here in Georgia and under our laws, there is very little that can be done about it.
