Over the past few years a number of web sites have been born with the intention of displaying the photos made by police when someone is arrested. The sites obtain these photos (or mug shots) from law enforcement agencies and display them such that anyone can look for a particular person. These sites are searched for a variety of purposes including trying to see if a job applicant has a police record.
Well, being the subject of a mug shot does not mean that you have been convicted of a crime; everybody who is arrested gets photographed. So, even if you were never found guilty or never even went to trial, your photo is available to anyone with an internet connection. Naturally, you are not exactly pleased if you have had a run-in with the law. The mug shot web site has a solution for you. Pay them money and they'll remove your photo from their site. Sounds like pretty good business. They can claim that they're a warning service for the public and still get paid for removing photos.
These mug shot web sites have benefited by features of Google's search algorithms whereby these sites tend to be in the first page of a search for Mary Jones. The likelihood of an employer finding your name as a "criminal" is pretty high. However, this likelihood of being on the first page of a search will probably diminish very soon as the NY Times article describing the business has resulted in two actions which will severely impact the mug shot web sites. Google has changed its algorithms so that the mug shots do not typically appear on the search's first page. Credit card companies have stopped servicing the mug shot companies.
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