In today’s digitized world it can take mere seconds for potential employers, suppliers and business partners to look you up online and gain access to a plethora of information, data and images on past moments and events that one would rather prefer completely erased from their internet history.
In some cases, it’s someone posting false information, photos or video online to maliciously cause reputational damage to individuals or companies, negatively impacting careers and job prospects or destroying lucrative business deals.
Sveva Antonini, an intellectual property lawyer and co-founder of Italian tech firm LinKiller, says these are growing concerns clients come to them with, and includes a significant number of people who want to erase a part of their history that they no longer identify with and create a new, clean digital identity.
“We’ve had cases of [clients] who became politicians or [prominent] entrepreneurs and they no longer wanted to be connected to old pictures or videos,” Antonini explained in an interview with PYMNTS.
And LinKiller helps make that a reality. Depending on the time, type, and platform where the content was published, she said it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a month to complete the de-indexing process and take down the damaging content, which does not include content linked to sexual violence or criminal activity against minors such as pedophilia.
At the base of the technology is a database containing the contact details of different content providers, from bloggers, webmasters to newspapers, making it easy to automatically send out takedown requests to the relevant parties involved.
Web Reputation Management at Your Fingertips
The process is quite simple and straightforward, she said. If a client knows the exact content they want removed, all they have to do is download the application, enter the unwanted link and within 24 hours the feasibility of the intervention, which can be monitored in real-time, will be established.
And while the app does not guarantee complete removal of all unwanted content for each request, Antonini said the company’s legal team intervenes in the most complex cases to help determine the best approach to take, adding a much-needed human touch to the tech-based solution.
Building on the success of their current offering, the Bologna-based tech firm company has introduced another service called Link Monitor which allows users to monitor their online reputation in real-time at any given time of the day.
“This software scans 186 million sources — blogs, social networks, newspapers — in 147 languages and enables you to know five minutes after entering your name and surname if they were mentioned somewhere in the world,” Antonini explained.
Today, the EU-based firm, which launched in 2017, removes and de-indexes about 10,000 links annually with a success rate close to 90%, and has since exported its technology to France and Portugal, two European countries that have adopted a similar approach to Italy when it comes to online reputation management.
Complex Regulations, US Expansion
The right to be forgotten (RTBF) law in Europe gives citizens the right to have private information about themselves removed from online searches, while the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), considered one of the toughest data privacy laws in the world, also provides additional rights around consumer data privacy.
Against that regulatory backdrop, Antonini said it is easier now to make demands for content to be removed, given that websites, internet service providers, blogs and webmasters are obliged to comply with regulation.
Moving forward, she said expanding to the U.S. market is a goal they hope to achieve in the near future, even though the differences in Right to Information laws between Europe and the U.S. will be a key challenge in meeting user demands there.
She referenced the case of an American client, 45, who wanted to remove articles about alleged criminal activity from when he was 23 but in the end was unable to do so due to the laws in the US.
“We tried, but it was completely impossible because in the United States, in the balance between right to information and the right to be forgotten, the right to information is much stronger than in Europe,” Antonini said.
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