Remove online content

Uploaded something you need removing?

Internet presence removal is an ever increasing requirement. Many people are finding themselves in the position of wishing that they had never uploaded certain images or written certain content and occasionally, the only way to get rid of that content is to totally wipe your internet presence and start again.

Another reason is that many prospective employers consult social media pages before interviewing nowadays and any negative uploads can have a negative effect on a successful job application. There are many other reasons why you might want all references about you removing from the internet including legal or unlawful matters to the simple fact that you might just not like the content you have written in the past and want it gone or just don’t like the fact the internet makes you very easy to find.

Is withdrawing entirely from the internet possible?

The simple answer is no! Many web places are legally allowed and obliged to hold data about you online. Sites such as 192.com, White pages and similar and electoral role sites. Even newspaper sites are allowed in law to hold content about you if it formed part of a news reel. Even very old news articles are legally allowed to remain in place as long as they were portrayed accurately.

However, recent legislation can help an individual remove content that is no longer in the public interest or has become inaccurate, but it is still not easy. The biggest hurdle is the time it takes for site owners to respond to removal requests. Many companies refuse to remove content on their sites simply because of the bother but this is slowly changing and new laws will speed this change.

Some sites such as Etsy make it almost impossible to delete all traces of your accounts. Twitter signed a deal with the Library of Congress in 2013 giving it the right to archive all public tweets from 2006 onwards. This means that anything you might have posted publicly since then is technically owned by the government and will stay archived even if you delete your account! In these cases we recommend altering your tweet settings to ‘private’ so only approved followers can read them.

In the European Union, a recent Court of Justice ruling gave EU residents the right to request that irrelevant, defamatory information be removed from search engine databases. We have utilised this legislation on many occasions.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to communicate socially without the aid of a Facebook or Twitter account and considering the realities of our connected world today, not being online can be seen as a negative step.

We help our clients take back control of their data in order to re-manage it at a satisfactory level. This is time consuming work and can take many weeks or even months to complete and requires a continuous input from you, the client.

We utilise the latest professional utilities to assist in this, we use search engine utilities and use many different on-line and off-line methods to secure the removal of certain data. We also utilise the legal aspect to a websites Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies to manage stored data.

If you have any concerns about your online data or are finding difficulty in trying to remove some (or any) of it, contact us below and we will be happy to assist you in this matter.