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In the U.S., Google consents to such requests only in the rarest circumstances, typically requiring a court order. Google's top privacy lawyer, Peter Fleischer, is based in Paris. The company sent him there to counter the movement Shefet helped build.
Dan Shefet won what may be the most powerful single case against Google: the right to get search results about himself removed. Now people and governments the world over are seeking him out.
In 2013, Shefet had a plain-vanilla legal practice. He wrote employment contracts and analyzed intellectual property claims. That all changed, he says, when a client's vengeful enemy took to the Internet and created websites that attacked Shefet — claiming he was a member of the Serbian mafia.
He felt his reputation and his career might unravel. Shefet obtained an order from a French court directing Google to stop highlighting the defamatory sites in search results for his name. He hired a courier to serve the injunction at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.
But Shefet does not want the tech titans to see him as the enemy. Though he has made his mark in the opposition, he says he wouldn't mind being a peacemaker, a broker between Silicon Valley and people who feel they've been harmed by the sludge on the Internet.