>E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing

>E.g: Man falsely but not maliciously accused of rape or murder in press reports and later being exonerated in court without accompanying press report detailing the exoneration, and now finds it very difficult to get a job or start new relationships. Or a business man who filled for bankruptcy 30 years ago who finds search engines return news reports of his bankruptcy as the first and only return on himself and thus makes finding business partners or credit near impossible. I'm not trying to blame the victims here, but if you're in these unenviable situations, wouldn't it be possible to avoid these problems by changing your name? If Google searches for "John Doe" (obviously, a more unique name than that) return press reports about you being tried for rape, changing your name to "Jim Smith" is going to eliminate that problem handily. A potential dating partner would have to do a significant background search on you to find out you changed your name, and then look up that one. I mean, it sucks that you'd have to go to the trouble of dealing with the courts to change your name, and also have to lose your name which you might have an emotional attachment to for understandable reasons, but for infrequent cases like this, this seems like a much easier thing to do than to try to get data warehouses around the world to stop reporting past stuff about you in response to queries.