A few years ago, Natàlia (fictitious name to preserve her identity) was played badly. She was the victim of something similar to revenge porn by her ex-boyfriend. A video of him with sexual content ended up on the Internet. She found out because a friend warned her: “Everyone has seen you on the internet”, she told him. She wanted to die. The impact was of such magnitude that he even considered the possibility of taking his own life if he could not eliminate it. He went to the police, but they told him to forget it, that the recording would be present on the web forever. Fortunately, years later, and through the intervention of a specialist company, he managed to erase it. Now she lives much more calmly.
Is it possible to erase your internet footprint? Natàlia, in her case, understood that yes, being, as she was, the victim of revenge porn. But it cost him sweat, tears and a lot of suffering. “It was to put my name in Google and the video would appear. It was on all the porn pages”, he explains to La Vanguardia.
Although he went to the police from the start, the recording has circulated on the internet for many years. “The police helped me, they tried to remove him from the places they could, but they told me there was nothing more they could do.” His suffering reached the point where he thought of committing suicide. “It has been torture. The luck is that I’m very strong, because another person wouldn’t be there.” In his day, he contacted several websites that are dedicated to removing content from the network, but was unsuccessful. However, he did not give up. Thanks to his eagerness, less than two years ago he found a company that, fortunately, managed to remove the video.
It is not an easy task to delete content from the network. It depends a lot on the type, points out Óscar Sánchez, head of operations at RepScan, the emerging company that solved Natàlia’s problem. “If we are talking, for example, about defamation, it is not at all simple to suppress it, because you have to provide a lot of evidence to search engines like Google – such as court rulings – to discredit it. It is very different if we are talking about an infringement related to your privacy or copyright. It’s relatively easy there.”
He also warns that it is not enough to reach an agreement with companies like Google, but it is necessary to go further. “With Google what you get is that certain information does not appear in the search engine, but if you want to remove it, you have to contact the server or the specific page directly.” Social networks are also their field of action.
They explain that they do not accept all the cases that come to them. “We reject those of people who have committed hate crimes: racism, against women, homophobia… We do provide services to the victims of these cases if they ask us to,” argues Mar Jufresa, co-founder and director of the company’s product. Nor do they accept cases “of potential rapists, pederasts, or of politicians who want to remove information linked to their public activity, because it is public content”, adds Sánchez.
Due to their activity – they are dedicated to monitoring the online reputation of companies and individuals – they have all kinds of clients. “From the hardware store on the corner to an Ibex 35 company”, explains Jufresa. “Or from the businessman who lives in America and has a thousand businesses to the private individual of the third second whose photograph has been uploaded”, he adds. In the end, he says, “the internet affects everyone”. And it’s true. That is why their clients are spread all over the planet and the number of cases they receive keeps increasing. So much so, that they have started a round of financing to continue growing. Within its team there are several professional profiles. From criminologists to graduates in ADE, business, marketing, lawyers… In their case, it is essential to know the legislation of each country in order to carry out their work. To begin with, the right to be forgotten is only possible in Europe and some Latin American countries, but not in the US. “In any case, there is another type of legislation that we can use to eliminate a certain type of content”, points out Sánchez.
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The same thing happens to Alejandra (fictitious name to maintain her anonymity) when she remembers what happened to her a few years ago. A pediatrician by profession, he practiced as such in his country, in Latin America. On more than one occasion he had appeared in the media to denounce the precarious situation of the health system. And this, he understands, he ended up paying. One fine day, as she explains, they showed up at the private center where some men worked and took her away. “It was horrible, a full-blown kidnapping. Years have passed since then, but he still trembles when he remembers it.”
She explains that they kept her confined in a kind of camp – “it was like a prison”, she says – for a month. After that time, she was brought to trial and the magistrate determined that there was nothing against her. “Fortunately, the judge was not confabulated”. Thanks to this, she was released. However, he quickly saw that his story had gone like wildfire. “Photographs of me appeared on the web in handcuffs. They only handcuffed me to take a snapshot, which they then distributed to the media.”
In the end, he ended up leaving his country and settled in Spain. However, her story haunted her. One fine day the head of the clinic where he found work found his photo surfing the net, and all the alarms went off. Although he believed his story – he was able to show him the sentence that exonerated him -, those articles circulating on the internet could harm the centre. That’s why his job was hanging by a thread. “I was desperate, about to lose my job because of an injustice.” Fortunately, like Natàlia, she ended up knocking on the right door and managed – thanks to the intermediation of the emerging company based in Barcelona – to delete her internet history. She, on her own, had tried without success. “I spent four years writing to Google, Twitter, Facebook… They told me yes, that they would remove the information, but that I had to wait. However, the time to withdraw it never came.”
Today he continues to work as a pediatrician in Spain. And encourage everyone who wants to delete some unfair information not to despair. “It can be achieved if there is a legal basis”, he concludes.
