While I can’t claim to have any personal experience with restraining orders, it seems as if they generally involve two people – two human beings, that is. Officials in a North Carolina county recently ignored this convention and took out a restraining order against Google.

Some personal information, including residents’ Social Security numbers, apparently wound up on a Johnston County site. Roughly six weeks later, someone finally noticed the mistake, and a scramble ensued to take the information down. It’s still present in Google’s cache, however, so county officials contacted the company.

The search engine company, according to The Daily Record (which is based in Dunn, North Carolina), wasn’t as helpful as it might have been. “Google has told the county it must fill out a form and wait five days for the information to be removed,” an article states. And so Johnston County court attorney Mark Payne got a restraining order against the corporation.

But Google spokesman Barry Schnitt explained to Mike Baker that most of the records were taken down just two days after the request for their removal was made. “We want to take it down – especially if it’s sensitive information,” Schnitt said. “This isn’t a unique request. In rare cases we’re not fast enough for the request, but usually with some kind of contact we can talk this through.”

As Schnitt implied, this isn’t the first time Google has encountered an issue like this; it isn’t even the first time the company has encountered it in North Carolina. Several months ago, Jason Lee Miller reported on an incident in which “the search engine crawled and indexed Catawba County Schools’ webpages containing the names, social security numbers, and test scores of 619 7th and 8th grade students.”

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Doug is a staff writer for Murdok. Visit Murdok for the latest eBusiness news.