Google clamps down as mugshot firms are accused of extortion

"While the sites portray themselves as offering a public service, " said the Times, "many of them make money by charging a hefty fee to individuals who don’t want their photos – and related evidence of their arrest – showing up prominently when someone does an Internet search for their name."

That practice is tantamount to extortion, say critics, who note that police routinely take mug shots whenever someone is arrested . . . so the photo galleries include many totally innocent people - released without being charged, let alone convicted of any crime.

But attempts to regulate the sites have run into First Amendment objections from journalism organisations, open-government advocates and others who don’t want to see the government "start down that slippery slope of restricting the use of public information."

Google, meanwhile, has been under pressure from those who’d like the Internet search engine to stop showing links to the sites.

A Google spokesman reportedly at first said there "wasn’t much the company could do about the mug shot sites". But he corrected himself two days later, however, and said he hadn’t initially known that the company was in fact already working on changing its algorithm to address the issue.

The new Google formula pushes the sites much lower in search results. On Twitter, Google search executive Matt Cutts said the company had been working on the problem since it was first highlighted by a security blogger .

Meanwhile, the Times said it also got a response from several credit card companies and PayPal, which process payments to the mug shot companies from people trying to get their photos taken down. Here’s how the Times described the response from MasterCard:

“We looked at the activity and found it repugnant,” said Noah Hanft, general counsel with the company. MasterCard executives contacted the merchant bank that handles all of its largest mug-shot site accounts and urged it to drop them as customers.

“They are in the process of terminating them,” Hanft said.

The Times said PayPal and other payment processors responded similarly.

One University of Texas undergraduate Maxwell Birnbaum was busted after after a van he was traveling in with friends was stopped. His knapsack contained six ecstasy pills and he was arrested and later agreed to a rehab programme.

However the mug shot from his arrest is still posted on a handful of for-profit Web sites, with names like Mugshots, BustedMugshots and JustMugshots. A week ago, the top four results for “Maxwell Birnbaum” were mug-shot sites.

These sites supposedly give the public "a quick way to glean the unsavory history of a neighbor, a potential date or anyone else," said the Times.

"That sounds civic-minded, until you consider one way most of these sites make money: by charging a fee to remove the image. That fee can be anywhere from $30 to $400, or even higher. Pay up, in other words, and the picture is deleted, at least from the site that was paid," says the Times.

To Birnbaum, and millions of other Americans now captured on one or more of these sites, this is grossly unfair. Mug shots are not proof of a conviction, and many people whose images are now on display were never found guilty, or the charges against them were dropped.

But these pictures can cause serious reputational damage, as Birnbaum learned , when he applied to be an intern for a state representative in Austin.

Birnbaum heard about the job through a friend.

“The assistant to this state rep called my friend back and said, ‘We’d like to hire him, but we Google every potential employee, and the first thing that came up when we searched for Maxwell was a mug shot for a drug arrest,’ ”

Mr. Birnbaum said. “I know what I did was wrong, and I understand the punishment,” he continued. “But these Web sites are punishing me, and because I don’t have the money it would take to get my photo off them all, there is nothing I can do about it.”