WOULD you take the opportunity to reinvent your life if you could?

Judging by the numbers involved in alternative reality games like Second Life with avatars that may be nothing like their real selves, it’s definitely a popular idea.

What is equally accessible, and attractive to a significant number of individuals now, is demanding that Google remove information about you.

Under the European “right to be forgotten” law, Google has received requests to remove 267,283 links in the UK. Many of these are from British politicians, celebrities and companies, with each request covering multiple search results. Google has apparently deleted four in 10 of these links, including links to newspaper websites and government documents.

What it means practically is that it is possible to re-write your history, removing any bits that may not reflect well on you or your company or organisation.

So when, as you and I probably often do, you go on to Google to find background details about someone or some organisation you’re interested in, you may be being given a carefully edited version and not the full picture.

By the law of averages, those asking for information to be deleted are not just public figures keen to distance themselves from teenage indiscretions. They are likely to include criminals, killers, sex offenders and fraudsters.

Ask yourself why anyone would want specific information to be unavailable to the general public and you can come up with your own answers.

What this amounts to – and it’s an argument that has been made often in the recent past and made little difference– is censorship and a manipulation of the facts.

According to the Daily Mail, its articles relating to a paedophile who abducted an 11 year-old girl before abusing and murdering her are among those already removed. Links to reports about a bank clerk who stole cash from pensioners have also gone.

The European Court ruling originally related to sites with content that was deemed “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”. We appear to have ventured into very questionable darker areas here.

We live in an information age and we are used to being able to get facts and general information at the click of a mouse. We rely on this and accept what we see onscreen.

Perhaps we now need to alter our views and factor in some scepticism because what we’re told are the facts are plainly not complete.