Google agrees to delete banker's 'vile and abusive' posts

By Staff Reporter - 24 Nov '14 10:58AM

U.S. tech giant Google has agreed to a settlement out of court with a former Morgan Stanley banker who sued the search engine and asked for "vile and abusive" material posted about him online to be permanently deleted.

Daniel Hegglin, 24, said he had been wrongly called a murderer, a paedophile and a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser by an unknown person online.

"The settlement includes significant efforts on Google's part to remove the abusive material from Google-hosted websites and from its search results," Hegglin's lawyer, Hugh Tomlinson QC, told the court, according to the BBC. "Mr Hegglin will now concentrate his energies on bringing the person responsible for this campaign of harassment to justice."

Daniel Hegglin said he had been wrongly called a murderer, a paedophile and a Ku Klux Klan sympathiser by an unknown internet troll.

Hegglin now lives in Hong Kong but worked at investment bank Morgan Stanley for 24 years and began his career in London.

"The settlement includes significant efforts on Google's part to remove the abusive material from Google-hosted websites and from its search results," said Hegglin's barrister, Hugh Tomlinson QC, according to The Week.

"Mr Hegglin will now concentrate his energies on bringing the persons responsible for this campaign of harassment to justice.

This is not the first time the popular search engine has been asked to remove content from the web and from its search results. Over 250,000 requests have been made to the search engine asking for links to information be removed from Google's European site branches. The company must remove links to "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant" information, but cannot delete the content itself.

Google lawyer Antony White said Hegglin had received an "exceptional" amount of Internet abuse.

He said Google wasn't responsible for policing the Web, but would "continue to apply its procedures that have been developed to assist with the removal of content which breaches applicable local laws."