Hi all,

Thought I'd share something positive and reassure everyone that there may be light at the end of the tunnel... My conviction recently became spent and with an uncommon name, I had fallen victim to the google effect previously.

I decided to write a personal email to my local newspaper groups (I found the person responsible for Data Privacy in the small print of their websites), highlighting my remorse, commitment to rehabilitation and asking them to help me rebuild my life / earn a living to support my family etc. etc.

The great news is that the articles were taken offline but that was just the start.

I then had to find all the news aggregation feeds that had linked to the original articles and re-published. While the links no longer went anywhere, they appeared in search results with the summary description (which of course named me and the offence). I therefore trawled all the leading search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Yandex,...) to find these links and then emailed the news sites to report the broken links. Most of them removed their links.

For the few remaining ones, I completed the online forms with each of the 6 search engines above. There was no push back as the original articles had been taken down so I didn't even need to provide any reasons or grovel. Eventually the search engine crawlers caught up and, hey presto, all the search results for my name are all the things I'm very comfortable with - social media, LinkedIn, sports reports and so on.

The feeling of relief once the conviction was spent was 8/10. The feeling of not being on Google et al is 11/10.  Now just another 5 years of notifying travel then I'm done with the system!