NY Times
[...] But once he is done, Mr. Birnbaum’s record will be clean. Which means
that by the time he graduates from the University of Texas at Austin, he
can start his working life without taint.
At least in the eyes of the law. In the eyes of anyone who searches for
Mr. Birnbaum online, the taint could last a very long time. That’s
because the mug shot from his arrest is posted on a handful of
for-profit Web sites, with names like Mugshots, BustedMugshots and
JustMugshots. These companies routinely show up high in Google searches;
a week ago, the top four results for “Maxwell Birnbaum” were mug-shot
sites.
The ostensible point of these sites is to give the public a quick way to
glean the unsavory history of a neighbor, a potential date or anyone
else. That sounds civic-minded, until you consider one way most of these
sites make money: by charging a fee to remove the image. That fee can
be anywhere from $30 to $400, or even higher. Pay up, in other words,
and the picture is deleted, at least from the site that was paid.
To Mr. Birnbaum, and millions of other Americans now captured on one or
more of these sites, this sounds like extortion. Mug shots are merely
artifacts of an arrest, not proof of a conviction, and many people whose
images are now on display were never found guilty, or the charges
against them were dropped. But these pictures can cause serious
reputational damage, as Mr. Birnbaum learned in his sophomore year, when
he applied to be an intern for a state representative in Austin. Mr.
Birnbaum heard about the job through a friend.“The assistant to this state rep called my friend back and said, ‘We’d
like to hire him, but we Google every potential employee, and the first
thing that came up when we searched for Maxwell was a mug shot for a
drug arrest,’ ” Mr. Birnbaum said. “I know what I did was wrong, and I
understand the punishment,” he continued. “But these Web sites are
punishing me, and because I don’t have the money it would take to get my
photo off them all, there is nothing I can do about it.” [...]