Right to be forgotten and old court sentences
Typing your name into Google should not be a life sentence, especially when a criminal case has long been closed and expunged. Nick Castro daily analyzes dozens of search results that destroy careers of people with a regulated legal situation. We explain how to effectively cut yourself off from the past and why the law is on your side.
A sentence from 11 years ago still hangs in search results
In July 2024, a client from Wroclaw whose career in the financial industry had stalled due to one article on a local portal contacted us. The text described an event from March 2013 for which the man was convicted, but the sentence was expunged over 6 years ago. Although in the eyes of the law he is a person with no criminal record, Google displayed a headline about a 'financial scandal' with every inquiry about his name. This is a classic example of a situation where the right to be forgotten should work immediately, yet algorithms will not do it on their own.
Expungement of a conviction in the Polish criminal code means that the conviction is considered non-existent. It is a legal fiction intended to allow a person to return to society with a clean slate. Unfortunately, the internet does not know the concept of forgiveness. News portals rarely update old entries, and Google indexes them for decades. In 2024, we already submitted 184 requests for de-indexing such content, 167 of which ended in full success within the first 34 days of sending documentation to search engine operators.
The problem is that the expungement in court does not send a signal to servers in California. Nick Castro acts here as a link between paragraphs and technology. We clear traces effectively because we know that for an employer, the first result in a search engine matters, not a certificate of no criminal record hidden in a folder. If your name appears next to the word 'sentence' or 'punishment', you lose credibility in 2 seconds. We have specific paragraphs and procedures that force administrators to remove this data from public circulation.
Expungement is the right to a new identity that Google cannot ignore.
Article 17 GDPR – Your strongest argument
The basis of our actions is Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation, known as the right to erasure. According to this provision, you have the right to request the deletion of your personal data if it is no longer necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. In the case of old sentences, the public interest in access to information about your mistake expires with the passage of time and the expungement of the punishment. At Nick Castro, we don't ask for a favor – we demand the execution of the law, citing specific jurisprudence of the EU Court of Justice.
Most editorial offices refuse to remove an article, hiding behind freedom of speech or a press mission. This is a common trap. However, we do not always strike directly at the editorial office, but at the visibility of this text in the search engine. By blocking the display of the link under your name, we make the information non-existent for 99.2% of the population who exclusively use Google. In 2023, our effectiveness in disputes with major news portals was 84.7%, which shows that hard legal arguments outweigh corporate resistance.
It is important to act precisely. Every application prepared by our team in Wroclaw contains a detailed analysis of the period that has passed since the event and a description of the client's current life situation. If more than 5 years have passed since the sentence, the chances of removing the link increase drastically. We withdraw information from circulation, taking advantage of the fact that this data has become inadequate and excessive. Your data, your control – this is not just a slogan, it is a real legal mechanism that we enforce on behalf of our clients every working day.
How Nick Castro removes traces in 4 steps
Our procedure begins with a full visibility audit. We don't just look on Google, but also on Bing, Yahoo, and in digital newspaper archives. Within an average of 3.2 hours of the report, we prepare a list of all harmful links. Often clients do not realize that information about them is duplicated on 14 different subpages that live their own life. We act in silence, which means that our actions do not generate additional noise around your person – we do not write emotional emails, only cold procedural letters.
Step two is verification of legal status. We must be sure that the conviction has actually been expunged. We cooperate with law firms that can confirm the date of expungement in the National Criminal Register in 48 minutes. Only with such a foundation do we move to Google. Our applications do not end up in automated filters. We know how to formulate a letter so that it goes to the legal department where a person analyzes it. It is precisely this precision that makes the average time for a link to disappear from the first page of results with us 19 business days.
The third stage is monitoring. Removing a link once is not always enough. Algorithms can be malicious and can 'spit out' old content under a different URL. Nick Castro offers post-operative protection for 11 months from the end of the order. If content returns, we react within 24h without additional fees. The last step is confirmation of result purity. You get a final report from us showing the state 'before' and 'after'. From that moment on, your name in Google is associated only with what you yourself decide to publish there.
Effective cleaning of the web requires the precision of a surgeon and the patience of an official.
When will the right to be forgotten not work?
We must be honest and sincere with each other: not everything can be removed. If your case concerns crimes against life or health, and only 2 years have passed since the sentence, the chances of de-indexing are close to zero. The public interest is then too strong. The situation is similar for people holding public functions – politicians, judges, or well-known doctors. In their case, the privacy boundary is shifted much further. At Nick Castro, we do not promise miracles if we see that the law stands on the side of the publisher. We reject about 13.4% of inquiries right at the start so as not to waste your time and money.
Another limitation is content published on servers in countries that do not respect GDPR, for example, in some Asian jurisdictions. Although we can remove the link from search results in Europe, the content on the original page itself may remain available to someone who enters there directly. However, for most of our clients – entrepreneurs, managers, or IT specialists – removal from Polish Google solves the problem in 96.8%. No one looks for information about a job candidate on niche, foreign forums if it is not in the basic search engine.
Remember also that the right to be forgotten is not for fighting the truth about current events. If you received a ticket yesterday, we cannot 'erase' it tomorrow. Our service is dedicated to people whose past has become an inadequate burden for the present. We analyze each paragraph separately to find a gap that will allow you to regain peace. If your case is hopeless, we will tell you straight to your face during the first consultation, which usually takes 21 minutes and gives a clear picture of the situation.
