How often have we not heard “once on the Internet, always on the Internet”. It is so, that once you upload something personal onto the cloud, it is impossible to take down. Or at least we thought so.
A life-ending picture
Imagine you have the job interview of your life, and the interviewer comes across an embarrassing photo of you that you thought you had deleted from your Facebook page. Bye-bye to your dream job. And all because of an indecent picture some friend uploaded for fun. Now it’s not “fun” anymore, is it?
The right to forget
Well, a couple of years ago Google introduced the option of applying for your personal information to be deleted from the Internet. This finally made “leaving Google” possible, yet still very hard to accomplish. It works like so: the information is still on the original website, but it’s not available for people to search on Google.
But don’t think Google was actually thinking about you. Truth is, that it was the result of a sentence from the European Union Justice Tribune. It stated our right of suppression, also known as, our right to forget.
Over half of the applications are rejected
This is good news for those of us who’ve had the most embarrassing pictures taken. However, what’s not so good news is how difficult it is for your request to be approved.
Over 55% of all requests have been rejected since its implementation. This means it’s quite probable your application gets turned down. But it’s not impossible. You just need one thing: money. And quite the amount of it.
It’s not exactly cheap
Companies that are in favor of the right to forget are not exactly the cheapest. For every URL you want deleted, they ask between 100€ and 1,000€, depending on your case and the difficulty behind it.
However, the difference with these companies is that they actually do delete the information, rather than just the search. It’s not that it won’t appear on Google. It will not appear anywhere because the information is completely gone. Are such amounts of money worth it?
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