Google might as well be the official record for many people.
I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it.
Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.
I couldn’t agree more. Public records are technically public, but often opaque and difficult to access. It’s one thing to allow a sufficiently motivated person to find this information out; it’s quite another to make it easy for casual acquaintances and neighbors to do it.
Google makes these records instantly accessible to anyone, and for whatever reason, seems to push more negative results about an individual higher in the search results. One need to look no further than to observe the prominence of Ripoff Report results in Google searches to prove this. The people behind this extortion scheme, which operates under a disgusting perversion of the Communications Decency Act, tout their Google dominance as one reason that their victims should pay them thousands of dollars per month to delete or modify the “reports” against them that appear on the site.