TOLEDO, Ohio – Two Internet sites that make money by posting millions of mug shots of people who’ve been arrested have agreed to stop charging them to take down their photos as part of a settlement in a federal lawsuit.
The lawsuit came about after a number of complaints from people who said the websites were charging hundreds of dollars to remove the mug shots even if the cases against those arrested had been dropped.
The settlement in U.S. District Court in Toledo doesn’t apply to all of the mug shot sites that can be found online, just two – BustedMugshots.com and MugshotsOnline.com. Full Article
This is a positive step forward in stopping those who extort money from registered citizens and others not convicted of a sex offense. Unfortunately, there are several more sites that need to be stopped. We are working diligently toward that goal.
Could someone please list the 2 sites so I can check to see if I am being listed. I will contact them and tell them to remove the listing. I would not find that information listed in the article.
It would seem to me that it would be easy to get those other sites to comply as well since this precedent has been set…if only someone or some powerful organization like…oh I don’t know…like the ACLU who has the funds would bother to do something.
I stopped supporting the ACLU a long time ago for inactivity with sex offender issues. Seems like defending the Constitution of the United States of America is not that important to them (at least as far as us lowly unpopular SEX OFFENDERS go)!
Does anyone (Janice?) know what the status of the sor archives case is? It’s the one that was moved to Arizona last year. I hope these creeps have to shut down because they will no longer be able to extort money from people with way to many challenges in their lives because of people like the ones that run these kind of sites.
For profit business using a person without consent has to be waaaaaay wrong and against the law….everyone should be getting alotta money for the wrongful business practice…yes..???…..who’s putting in a lawsuit for that..?..I’m in for BIG financial lawsuit.
In checking, I have noted that Google has in fact made an effort to push the photos from these sites many pages back in their listing so they are virtually nonexistent for the most part.One site, http://www.homefacts.com appears to have escaped their efforts and they still have some small photos on the first Google page. Need to work on them. Also Bing and Yahoo have made no similar effort to push photos from these mugshot sites toward the rear. Hopefully they can be persuaded to do the same in the near future.
Well I had a scheme to push my mugshot.com pic down to the bottom of Google, by flooding google image results with pics that came up with my last name. It worked great, until google automatically pushed it down to the bottom. Now anyone knowing about google’s policy and actively looking for a mugshot, will just go to the last result.
Thankfully, mugshotplanet.com removed my profile for free, after I sent proof of exoneration (Dismissal in California, AKA 1203.4). Mugshots.com did it for $199 (instead of $399) with the same proof, after I found this little “courtesy removal” link in their terms & conditions: http://unpublisharrest.com/terms-of-service/ under “Document Verification.”
So if you have an exoneration or dismissal (yes you’d still be on Megan’s Law, but want to get off the mugshots searches) you can try these methods.
Related story just posted to the Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mugshots-lawsuit-20140121,0,3951805.story#axzz2rBboYGpX