14 DAY TRIAL // Mugshot sites have started becoming popular in recent years, after entrepreneuring people found that they could take mugshots from law enforcement agencies from all around the US and then put them up online. For a price, those who would rather not have their past haunt them online, can ask for their photos to be removed.
Overall, it sounds and works a lot like extortion, but it is mostly legal. There is a class action lawsuit against several of these sites, and there are many of them, but it's unclear whether it will go anywhere. Mugshots are considered public information.
The New York Times tells the story of a few people affected by these sites, people who haven't been charged for the things they were arrested for or who have turned their lives around. They face an uphill battle trying to remove their mugshots from the web. Even if they convince one site, with money or a good argument, there are dozens more to deal with.
It's clear that these sites are pretty interesting to the people that visit them. Doing a search for a person will often bring up one of these sites in the top results. It's easy to see why most people would click on those links and then stick around and maybe search for more people.
This is why these sites rank so well in Google and why they're able to make the money they make. But there may be a solution; Google has already implemented an algorithm change that would penalize mugshot sites. In fact, at this moment, the sites aren't even in the first page of results for many of the queries where they ranked at the top before.
Mugshot sites are being hurt at the other end as well, as several payment companies, including the big credit card companies and PayPal, have said that they had either stopped working with this type of sites or are investigating the matter. All of this though happened after the New York Times contacted these companies. Google says it has been working on a fix for the issue for a few weeks now.