Hi All

This topic is very close to my heart.  I've been on it for some years and have learnt a lot. Of course all this is personal experience and views of my own as I'm not legally qualified.

If you find your spent conviction published on a web site, there's a couple of things you can do:

1) You can ask Google to disable any searches for that site, so people can't find it.  I did this and they responded surprisingly quicky.  They remove any links/searches from their database.  In my case, they disabled any searches for my name and that link.  You can apply here:

https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en-GB

2) My experience, often of media organisations is they will just ignore you.  So.... you tell them you want to request your Right To Erasure.  It's explained on the Information Commission web site here:

https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/your-right-to-get-your-data-deleted/

So... you bang off your request and they have 1 month to respond.  Being both stupid and arrogant, they probably won't even reply, but..... the data Protection Act gives a Data Controller (them) 1 month to reply.  If they don't, you email them informing them of this and they are now in breach of the GDPR.

Of course, they might reply and just say 'get lost', but my experience is this wakes them up a little.
If you can, try and get the email address of the Data Protection Officer of the organisation you're dealing with.  You can often find this on their privacy notice on their web site.

You can then make a complaint to the Information Commission for the breach.  This is worth doing as it's only an email, but be prepared for the fact the ICO are pretty much useless, deserving of  their score of about 1 on Trustpilot:

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/ico.org.uk

This is the lowest score possible.

But all is not over, the DBS used to publish spent convictions.  The Human Rights organisation, Liberty took the to court saying it was a breach of the Human Rights Act.  Liberty won and the Judge said in his summing up:

as [the conviction] recedes into the past, it becomes a part of the person’s private life
usually be the point at which it becomes spent under the 1974 [ROA] Act

more info here:

https://inforrm.org/2017/02/02/spent-convictions-in-the-law-of-privacy-and-data-protection-part-1-aidan-wills/

Next thing to do is quote this case and they will (hopefully) realise they have breached your human rights.

I did have a link to the actual case, but seem to have lost it.  If somebody wants it, I'll try and find it again.

One thing I tried was the Unlock page which says that Carter Ruck solicitors would take on your case on a pro-bono basis.

My advice would be don't bother.  It was quite the uphill struggle to get them to reply in the first instance and when I did engage and pushed them , they said they couldn't do it on a pro-bono basis and wanted £4.5K to collate info and write a letter.  My view was that they REALLY weren't interested, but wish they had said so at the start, without raising my hopes and wasting my time.

I get a bit of a feel now for site owners that will/won't help.  Typically they don't reply.  After 2 weeks of my application to be forgotten, I send them a chaser reminding them they have 2 weeks left to respond.

I categorise sites as either 'helpful' or 'sticky'.  The BBC being very sticky.  It took a year of my time to get them to comply with the law.  They hung onto this document like a dog with a bone.  Not sure what made the penny drop, but simultaneously, I got my MP involved and threatened to sue them for Defamation with Malice.  Defamation as the conviction was spent and Malice as the information was wrong.  Somehow, they gained sentience and removed the document.

The total cost was a lot of my time and a packet of biscuits for my MP.  Bargain!  I think it also helped that I pointed out to my MP that the BBCs's Data Protection Officer was now in breach of the Data Protection Act.  I'm guessing she didn't want that on her CV 😂  

Sorry this is so long........

I documented the whole thing with the BBC, other sites and my experience with Carter Ruck and offered it to Unlock as a personal story.  It was never published and have no idea if it was rejected etc as unlock have never come back to me despite chaser emails.

If anyone's interested I'll post it up here.  It's a long read as it's a long story.

As mentioned I've dealt with a large number of websites publishing my spent conviction.  Some have been very helpful.  Some redacted the document quickly as requested and some simply deleted the offending section.

Oh, one last bit.  If you think the web site owners are taking the PEE heavily and they might well be, stay polite ay all times, gently 'upping the anti' as you go.

Best of luck to you all.

Cheers

Steve

Coo, replying to my own post.  It's quite here!

Just a couple of other bits to pass on in case you haven't read enough yet 😂😂

There's always the law that can help protect you, but solicitors are expensive and I don't have the dosh.  but there are other ways.....

Every organisation's web site will be hosted by someone, probably another company for example, Amazon Web Services.  Typically the hosting company will publish their Terms Of Service and in there you will find their declaration for their compliance to the GDPR and their expectation of compliance of their customers.

if you email the hosting company and complain after the 1 month in which the problem site owner hasn't replied, you can tell the hosting company the site owner in in breach of the GDPR and that will raise their eyebrows.

the original offender will be the site owner, but if the hosting company continues to publish the information, once they are aware of it, they are liable too and they won't like this.  it may be that they just take the site down or remove the content itself.  more than 1 way to skin a cat!

How do you find out who hosts the offending web site?  It's a little techy, but not crazy hard.

1) in Windows, go to the command prompt 
2) In the command prompt, type ping offendingsite.com
3)  The reply will be the IP address of the site eg 111.222.333.444
4) Go to https://www.whois.com/whois/ and type in the iP address

This will tell you who the host is.  I'm currently working with the owners of discoverleveson .com who have been helpful so far, so here's the example:

C:\Users\myname>ping discoverleveson.com

Pinging discoverleveson.com [63.33.175.229] with 32 bytes of data:

So now we have the IP address which is 63.33.175.229

Enter this into the whois search above and scroll down and we see:

Organization: Amazon.com, Inc. (AMAZO-4)Address:    Amazon Web Services, Inc

So now we know that Amazon Web Services host the site.I found AWS Terms Of Service (TOS) easily with a web search.  Reading through this, it became clear that some of the content (about me) on the was in breach of the TOS.I've not progressed this far as the site owners (Kingston University) have been helpful so far, but clearly it'san option if things don't go well.  I'm guessing having the site taken down will catch someone's attention!Ok that's it for now, despite no-one asking for it, I'm going to post up my pdf of the journey for the last year or so.You might like to get a comfy seat and a beer 😂CheersSteve  

What about the so called public interest exemption? The GDPR allows for journalism as well.
Did you come across any organisations quoting 'public interest' as their excuse and how did you deal with that?

Hi

Yes, but I think the phrase is 'substantially in the public interest' which they have to prove.  I agree, it's still a tricky one.

In my case, the ICO produced a document which I think clearly was in the public interest.  Being pretty dumb, they tacked on a list of unrelated recent prosecutions
which were nothing to do with the main topic of the document.

So..... A document in the public interest with unrelated convictions added on at the end.  I've never had to argue it, but think I could challenge whether including MY name
in that document was in the public interest.  it's a minefield. 

Just a bit more bleating on......  My conviction was spent in 2005.  The ICO published the document in 2006, so my conviction had been spent for a year on the day of publication.
This shows just how much people care about spent convictions.  Did i mention how dumb the ICO is? 😂 

Also (I think) the 'public domain' defence is tricky for the publisher.  Just because a document is easily findable on the Internet, it doesn't mean you haven't breached the GDPR

My approach is not to get into the legal stuff too quickly, but 'poke them in the eye' a few times and see if they crack.  As mentioned above, some sites were helpful and
responded quickly and were very helpful, whereas the BBC I had to go for their throat in the end.

And blowing  my own trumpet 'some oik from Kent' took on the BBC and won.  So it can be done.

Best of luck

Steve  

Just a quick update....  I mentioned discoverleveson.com which is owned by Kingston University.  After some initial communication problems, Kingston University
have been very helpful and the offending document is now redacted.  Took about a week, 🎈🎂🍾
I spent an hour the other day searching for this document in all kinds of ways and could only find 1 copy anywhere which is very pleasing.
the single copy is on the WayBack Machine which is an Internet Archiving service.  Not sure how to approach this, but will chew it over for a while.

After working like a trojan on this for a silly amount of time, I'm now keeping it at a low level so my head doesn't explode.  The plan is every month or two,
Have a search and if I find a copy, deal with that single item and stop.

Keep smilin' and Happy XMAS 😁

Cheers

Steve

Hi @punter99

I just read through these messages and realised i didn't fully answer your question.  I've never had 'public interest' quoted to me, so probs got off quite lucky.  You're right
that there are exemptions for the press and 'archival purposes' although these don't give web site owners 'carte blanche' to do what they like, even though they might think so.

Many hearings are in open court, so are public information, so anyone can report on them.  however, the government says it should be 'time limited'.

For me, the document lists my name, conviction and approximate location, making me personally identifiable.

A case in point is the BBC vs. Cliffe Richard.  Someone accused Cliffe of child abuse.  The police raided his flat and the BBC had helicopters outside filming the police
searching his flat.  Cliffe said it was an invasion of privacy.  As it turned out, it was proved the allegations were false.  It also turned out that the BBC had coerced
Yorkshire police into spilling the beans about the time/date of the search so the could line up their helicopters.

Cliffe won his compensation and the BBC had to pay that and Yorkshire police's costs which cost the BBC around £2m.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-49576940

Just a correction from the above, if a Data Controller deems the request to be 'complex' they have a maximum of 3 months to reply.  A long time, but patience is a virtue....

Cheers

Steve

The Cliff Richard case is about the right to privacy before a suspect has been charged.
After that public interest takes over, until a conviction is spent, which is where it gets messy.
There are good legal reasons for removing a story at that point, although some people on here have approached both Google and the ICO and been refused by both.

You're right, of course, so a different example, although privacy does come into a spent conviction.  As mentioned, not my experience with Google.
I don't have what I wrote in the original complaint, but probably mentioned it was defamatory.
As mentioned above, it's worth banging an email over to the ICO, but don't expect them to do anything apart from find reasons not to act.