European Companies See Opportunity in the 'Right to Be Forgotten'

Days after Europe's highest court said people could ask search engines to remove some links about themselves, Andy Donaldson started to receive phone calls.

Donaldson's British company, Hit Search, had previously created a service for companies and individuals to monitor how and where they were mentioned across the Internet. Now, the callers wanted to know how they could take advantage of the court's unexpected decision. And Hit Search - like a growing number of European companies - suddenly saw the potential to profit from Europe's "right to be forgotten" ruling.

"It's a whole new business opportunity for us," said Donaldson, a director at the company. "People want to protect how they appear in search results."

He said prices start at 50 pounds, or $85, a month to monitor how often someone is mentioned online and request that links be removed.

(Also Read: Google Reverses Decision to 'Forget' Links to UK's Guardian Newspaper)

In May, the European Court of Justice ruled that anyone - people living in Europe and potentially those living outside the region - could ask search engines to remove links to online information if they believed the links breached their right to privacy.

Already, more than 70,000 requests have been made through an online form created by Google, which runs the dominant search engine in Europe. But the company has provided little detail about how it decides which links should be removed, and only in late June started telling people whether their requests had been successful.

The confusion around how the ruling should be carried out has created a business opportunity - almost out of thin air.

Reputation VIP, a French startup that helps companies and people manage their online reputations, had offered a service costing up to 3,000 euros, or $4,000, a month to help brands or celebrities play down negative publicity by trying to influence what type of links can be found through online searches.

After the court's decision, Bertrand Girin, the company's chief executive, created a separate product, one aimed at individuals who want help submitting requests to search engines. The service includes boilerplate text that people can use for specific cases, like removing links to a home address or online references to a divorce.

The product also allows people to submit requests through the company's website or make them through Google's stand-alone online form.

So far, the service - called Forget.me - is free. Girin expects to charge customers eventually, however, through a so-called freemium model, in which people get the basic service free and then pay for premium add-ons, like custom-made letters or requests that can be submitted across multiple search engines.

"We saw an opportunity," said Girin, who added that his company had so far submitted around 2,000 requests related to more than 7,600 online links. Roughly half of the requests had been made on behalf of people in Britain, France and Germany.

"When Google put its form online," he said, "we saw there could be a lack of understanding for some people about how to submit requests."

The land grab from marketing agencies and other startups has not been universally welcomed.

Iain Wilson, a data protection partner at law firm Brett Wilson in London, said many of these companies did not understand the complexities of the European court's ruling. They include decisions on whether the potential case was linked to someone's online privacy and how best to submit requests to search engines so they removed the harmful links.

"A lot of reputation management companies are jumping on the bandwagon," said Wilson, who had sent letters to Google both before and after the court's decision, asking for information to be taken down from search results. "Anyone who comes to us with a privacy problem, this legal decision is something new in our toolbox."

While companies are jostling to offer would-be customers new ways to send requests to Google, the majority of the more than 70,000 submissions have come through the company's web form. Google does not charge people to send requests.

(Also Read: Google Starts Removing User Search Results for 'Right to Be Forgotten' Ruling)

Rishi Lakhani, an independent online marketing consultant in Britain, said he had made 30 filings to Google on behalf of five clients. Among the sites that were subjects of requests was one owned by a U.S. newspaper, he said.

Even for those companies offering a level of expertise, however, the request process has not always been smooth.

Simon Wadsworth, a managing director of Igniyte, a British online reputation agency, said Google had rejected almost all of the initial requests made on behalf of his clients. Many of the submissions failed, he said, because Google insists that links to information in the public interest must remain online. He said his company was learning from the failures about which types of requests Google would grant.

Wadsworth said that even when clients were not covered by the ruling - like companies and people with public profiles - the process has given Igniyte a chance to sell other services aimed at cleaning up clients' Internet reputations. That included the creation of online content to promote a positive view of clients, to counteract existing online information.

"No one really knows what the criteria is," he said, in reference to Google's response to people's online requests. "So far, we're getting a lot of noes. It's a complete no man's land."

© 2014, The New York Times News Service