23 ms·

A man who spent $100K to remove a lie from Google

423 points by Fins 9y ago

upofadown 9y ago
The article fails to mention why the successful defamation suit did not result in the takedown of the website and the payment of damages.
- jeremyjh 9y ago
  I'm sure it didn't help that his attacker lived in Turkey.
jaytaylor 9y ago
Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. Not Quite A Classic Submarine Article (thank you for the correction, thisisit!). Just an overt marketing piece in this case. Way to go NPR.. doing the tough journalism, really pounding the pavement here. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  I would guess most people on HN know about this PR technique, no need to point it out every time you see it. For myself I enjoyed the article. I didn't know the right to be forgotten wasn't in place in the US.
  - toxicFork 9y ago
    I disagree: it is very helpful to point it out every time it's seen so that the readers will get educated, or reminded to remain critical.
  - verylittlemeat 9y ago
    It should be pointed out every time to the point where HN should even include a tag on articles that are confirmed PR. Allowing these "advertisement as a story" posts to stand may already be normalized but it doesn't have to continue to be.
    - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
      I agree that you have a point. But on the other hand, the cynical in me says that in a sense all articles are like that. Part of these articles are a plug for some startup's PR, part are a techie writing about his hobby because that builds his name and maybe lands him a client, part are big newspapers that need the traffic to sell advertising, some authors write because they want to push their ideological point of view, firms write about the latest bug because they sell security services and expect to win a contract, etc. In a sense no one writes articles expecting nothing in return.
- toxicFork 9y ago
  Thank you for this link, it really opens one's eyes!
- raverbashing 9y ago
  I don't see how this disqualifies the issues presented in the article Still, in the US it seems to be a theme "companies solving problems created by other companies being stupid", see """identity theft"""
- colechristensen 9y ago
  ...which is the last paragraph of the article. Your comment reads like it's a secret that he's a founder of the company when that is laid out pretty clearly. >Ervine says his reputation was damaged and it hurt his career. Today, he is building a tech company called Bridg-it, to protect people like him who have been attacked online. He doesn't want anyone else to pay like he did. All told, Ervine spent about $100,000 in legal fees. In Europe, he would have just filled out a form.
  - neolefty 9y ago
    Honestly I thought it added to the story. Yes, he's founding a company that seems to be aimed at cyber-bullying in schools, which sounds (1) good for society, and (2) not super-profitable. It seems more like activism-entrepreneurship than self-promotion.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      One thing that didn't really connect for me was the article seeming to indicate that he created a business to help others deal with the difficult process of getting information removed from the likes of Google, but then the business website seems to be about school issues.
      - neolefty 9y ago
        Good point. My only thought was—maybe they pivoted? The law doesn't really back up right-to-be-forgotten in the US. Cyber-bullying is a significant problem where I live, so I can believe there's a business opportunity (shudder at the phrasing) there.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- TomK32 9y ago
  I thought this was an article advertising for the European Union.
- thisisit 9y ago
  Yes, the article does point to the fact that he's the founder of a company selling a service. But, this is not a submarine. You can look at the example quoted by Paul Graham: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/the-new-peacocks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/th... The difference is that the submarine pieces are subtle PR pieces.
  - jaytaylor 9y ago
    That's a good point. Thank you.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. Surely that makes complete sense? The bloke spent 100k on the effort, from that they can infer: 1. there's need for a middleman able to handle that for people who don't have the time or money 2. if you can do it for significantly below 100k there's lots of money to be made
- gaius 9y ago
  he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google He’s already a billionaire, did you miss that part? Why would he need to do sneaky PR stunts?
  - retSava 9y ago
    Because there's a difference between how I read an ad versus an article. The point of submarines is to get the reader to drop parts of the defense one has against ads and be more open to the content.
- appleflaxen 9y ago
  great point. one wonders, though, if it's selection bias, because how could anybody who isn't an expert in this area possibly succeed in this to the point where the story becomes interesting? "normal citizen is slandered on internet and shows up in youtube" is a completely non-viable story, unfortunately.
- ksk 9y ago
  >Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. You mean like all of the other front page links about people selling their stuff? Or people who blatantly link directly to product pages when Apple or Google or MS launches the next shiny thing? I bet if we go through your comment history we'll see that you were all up in arms when people posted those too!! >Not Quite A Classic Submarine Article (thank you for the correction, thisisit!). Just an overt marketing piece in this case. You forgot hes also wearing a very specific sweater, pants and glasses. I bet he got paid to pimp those too! Oh and and a book behind him was suspiciously placed a bit weird to attract your attention. You're totally on the right track here buddy ! /s >Way to go NPR.. doing the tough journalism, really pounding the pavement here. NPR didn't submit or upvote the article. Oh wait.. do they have bots?
- fastball 9y ago
  Sounds like a service Rick Santorum needed.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  NPR does this sort of thing all the time. Their reputation model is built around direct public sponsorship, so they can't just run regular ads. But they also need the money, and ads are a seductive source of revenue. They are subtle enough about it that I still occasionally hear people mention that NPR or PBS doesn't have ads. Sometimes I am able to obnoxiously interject and explain what natives and submarines are, but most of the time I have to leave them to their ignorance. I am particularly annoyed whenever they are pushing music or books, because they often have this "tote bag" and "kaffeeklatsch" demographic target that doesn't always align with me. So the "cultural reporting" ads fall flat.
- danso 9y ago
  The article makes the case that he was inspired to create the business after suffering the problem himself. Not exactly a secret or unusual.
CaliforniaKarl 9y ago
Some background behind the comment I’m about to make: I was born in Ohio and lived in the state until, after graduating from OSU, I moved to Newport Beach (Orange County, California) for work. I only moved to the Bay Area because I didn’t get a startup-style job, although I respect the people who work in startups; I definitely wouldn’t be able to keep up. I have become extremely concerned that many people who work in the Bay Area—or who work for companies based in the Bay Area—have, in the large, forgotten that their users are fellow human beings. I am turning more and more to the belief that _everyone_ in a company needs to have some unfiltered interaction with the company’s users on a regular basis. Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people.
- vinceguidry 9y ago
  Something clicked in me when I read the story of how Bill Gates used to wander into the support center from time to time and take a few calls. If and when I start a business, everybody is going to wear all the hats, for as long as that can be kept up. All developers do support. No job is so unimportant that the CEO can't jump in and pick up some slack. Everybody needs to be reminded that this is a large operation with lots of moving pieces, but at the end of it is a customer with real needs getting served by your efforts.
  - ConceptJunkie 9y ago
    That works great for a small company, but once you find that overall productivity increases proportional to the square root of headcount, it will become less and less feasible.
    - vinceguidry 9y ago
      That's fine. Hopefully by then it'll get ingrained into the culture.
- gambiting 9y ago
  I work for a large games company(as a programmer) and recently visited our customer support centre - man, it really hit hard realizing how much impact our product has on people, and how shielded you can be as a programmer from this impact. They played some calls for us, where people weren't even upset that our game wasn't working or the servers were down - they were just sad, they were at a difficult moment in their lives and our games would cheer them up, or they took a day off work to play, or they were ill and playing multiplayer with their friends was a highlight of their day - it just made me realize that if we break something, people care, and not just in a "I paid my money I want my game!!!" kind of way. As a programmer you work through your list of tasks and go home, especially in large companies the impact of what you do is hiding behind layers of customer support, community managers etc, where if it filters down to you it's already been diluted to a sterile bug description at best.
jon_richards 9y ago
Personal feelings aside, I think this is quite indicative of European and the US values. The US generally values the freedom to, while Europe values freedom from. Things obviously get more complicated when multiple parties are in play, but those seem like the fundamental properties on which the laws are built.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Which is ironic since freedoms as specified in the american constitution are freedoms from. It does not grant people freedoms, instead it assumes as evident that people have those freedoms and imposes limitations on the government to infringe those freedoms.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    The problem is that it only imposes limitations on the government to infringe those freedoms; while an affirmative "freedom from X" guarantee applies to everyone who might infringe that freedom. Your fellow citizens can be just as harmful to your freedoms as the gov't; and actually maintaining any freedom requires actively limiting the freedom of other people to infringe on that, and enforcing that limitation.
    - jakeogh 9y ago
      How? Less gov limitations? You cant have it both ways. Limits on government force are inverse to limits on it's people. The Bill Of Rights is a list of things we want to remember that the gov can never do (see it's preamble), it's a bit of a bug that it's called that. Gov is special, we _give_ it the ability to use violence to enforce the rules we set. Corporations don't get to use violence to enforce their rules (unless they buy the gov in a country without the 2ndA). It's a real difference. We are not forced to use a private service (which is why conservatives are so anti forced "health care"), nobody is required to use FB, or YT. Only confused (or ill) people think they are. A properly functioning system of exchange regulates this via monetary physics. FB is going to be myspace sooner or later. People learn from their mistakes if they have the freedom to make them.
lordnacho 9y ago
If he were to move to Europe, would Google remove the results for him, worldwide?
- joopxiv 9y ago
  No, only from the European versions of Google. Google is actually sued by the French government because they feel that searches for French citizens should be censored based on the EU law on Google worldwide. Which to a certain extend makes sense because right now, if you see the red text mentioned in the article you can just visit the US version of the site to find the original results. However, if it would be China, Russia or any other authoritarian regime demanding that Google would censor their international engine, I think the sentiment would be quite different.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    I think if it happened then Google or search engines in general would quickly splinter into regional alternatives that provide whatever is allowed in their jurisdiction.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    This is the current behavior, but Google has received significant legal pushback from that stance. Canada's Supreme Court has also ruled that Google must remove results about their citizens globally. Google, looking for a friendly court, decided to ask the Northern District of California for an injunction preventing them from complying with the order, and California, true to form, issued such an injunction. Of course, the Northen District of California doesn't have jurisdiction over the Supreme Court of Canada, so by my read, Google is currently in violation of a court order in Canada. As far as I know though, Canada hasn't taken this any further yet. http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/ http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/
    - amarkov 9y ago
      The Supreme Court had noted in their ruling that, if Google were to show that it is in fact illegal in their home jurisdiction to comply with the order, that would change the analysis. Courts are generally pretty willing to engage in comity analysis; they understand there's a problem when a Canadian court orders an American company to violate American law.
merb 9y ago
> In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine's results had been altered well the search results ARE altered. google actually needs to save more data to hide a search result. it's silly that people attack google instead of the source. also if a single website tells a lie about somebody it's probably not a good source since a SINGLE website is never a good source. In european the cases were different and that's why I think "the right to be forgotten" is a dumb idea. actually official media outlets and newspapers had an article published about a guy who did something bad 15 years ago. written letters that is protected by most european law. however the guy didn't want that his bad history will be revelead so he sued. from than on everything started. here are my problems with the whole: * he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody * it's actually easier to restore trust by having a bad and a good article publish (i.e. if people change you could maybe find some writes who writes good things about you) * hiding search results won't hide the truth, it just makes it harder to access, which basically means nothing is forgotten it's just harder to find, how bad people were in the past actually there is a lot of stuff why the current system is bad.
- bkor 9y ago
  > he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody If you don't forgive/forget, there is no incentive for the person to behave differently. E.g. if someone once was involved with the police and as a result cannot get any proper job anymore, how would this individual ever change? Some countries seem to focused on punishing people for the rest of their lives. This sometimes under the assumption that people actually consider the impact of their actions before do it. Further, if a person is considered to be/treated as a criminal all the time then eventually they'll just behave as one.
  - AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
    You forgive, you don't forget. You can't have a society where we just sweep people's past history under the rug. The only clues we have to future actions and intents are past actions.
  - 9y ago
aiCeivi9 9y ago
I don't like how they idealize EU law. It is actually used by people that have something to hide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticis... . I would prefer it to be on case-by-case basis, not automated process.
- karma_fountain 9y ago
  From that wiki article, 95% are people wishing to protect their personal and private information. If the links are in the public interest then they are not removed. The only issue I see is that it is Google deciding on what is in the public interest, which granted is quite disturbing.
  - brownbat 9y ago
    The original right to be forgotten case was about how a guy in Spain couldn't get cheap credit because of past defaults. It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not someone has defaulted in the past. It allows society to lend money at reasonable rates. And it's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish newspaper that originally published had no obligation to remove this information, but the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing publication should change how it does business. There were no new rules for the Spanish government. That very government literally ordered the publication as a matter of public interest in the first place. Why change anything at the source? If someone were cynical, they might suspect the right to be forgotten had a touch of protectionism baked into its rationale, alongside the European idealism.
    - tremon 9y ago
      It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not someone has defaulted in the past. Seems that that mainly is in the creditors' interest, not the public's. And it's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish newspaper that originally published had no obligation to remove this information, but the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing publication should change how it does business. You're being willfully obtuse here. If you know exactly what the European Court ordered, you also know its rationale -- and thus know that it had nothing to do with national vs foreign.
ikeboy 9y ago
Somewhat ironically, it took me about a minute to find a ripoff report claiming some contractor was stiffed working on Bridg-it for several thousand. The name behind that complaint appears to be a real person, with an active twitter account with hundreds of followers and over a thousand tweets.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Sounds like a job for Bridg-it!
scandox 9y ago
> After dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out on the curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab. > "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says. I know the context somewhat justifies his reaction but still it's very funny to think of a world in which getting into a taxi prompts the person you're meeting with to contact law enforcement...I mean what if his driver just got caught in traffic? What if he decided he wanted to ditch the driver and have some privacy? Instead his dinner host is watching him out a window and decides his choice of transport is suspect?
- PostOnce 9y ago
  Maybe he was put on guard by the guy mentioning his driver at all? It might be suspect to mention your driver at all if it is in fact a normal occurrence.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    TFA said that Ervine was suspicious because of how little Yalincak had flexed about all his awesome possessions and privileges. It's possible that really rich people really are assholes.
    - zeveb 9y ago
      > It's possible that really rich people really are assholes. More charitably, just as poorer folks talk about the cool beer they had last week or the really great movie they saw, maybe rich folks talk about the brewery they just bought or their race horse's recent win. Different sums of money allow one different pleasures in life. There's nothing assholish about that.
      - txsh 9y ago
        You’ve never had a conversation with a poor person, have you?
    - PostOnce 9y ago
candiodari 9y ago
I find it baffling that this guy gets any support here at all: 1) he actually has the money to spend on this. He doesn't have a problem. 2) he's advertising his own company, and it's a typical scam : he's advertising his ability to take information about someone down ... 3) Needless to say, this person is selling "his services" to things like K-12 schools (read: customers that pay, but don't want to pay, and how much do you want to bet they never see any of that service they paid for, but never wanted ?)
phonebucket 9y ago
"It looked like he had something to hide, not like Google had made the mistake of highlighting false information." That quote explains a lot of the misunderstanding. Google's service should to be help a user find what they are looking for within the constraints of Google's legal obligations. Google's job should not be to police the accuracy of information.
- neolefty 9y ago
  And yet Google does want accurate information to show up higher, in general. It's a hard problem.
alex_duf 9y ago
>There's no humanity or kindness in Google. It's not about anyone else. It's all about Google I've said it before, and I'll say it again Technology is the mirror of humanity. We somehow don't like the face we see but we blame the mirror. Not that google is spotless, but really that shit show is just a reflection of how poor our humanity is in the first place.
exikyut 9y ago
> In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine's results had been altered. Whoa. I wouldn't mind seeing a screenshot of that!
- yosamino 9y ago
  It's not red anymore, but I remember having seen it before https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V (link goes here: https://policies.google.com/faq https://policies.google.com/faq) Google also does this in response to DMCA requests, the difference being that for the right-to-be-forgotten thing, there is no way to see what was removed. For DMCA takedowns, google hosts and links to the specific DMCA request, wich contains the URLs that were removed, rendering the while process somewhat moot.
  - exikyut 9y ago
    Interesting. That's a Europe-specific snippet though (incidentally I've never seen that before; do I need to be in Europle to see it - is the right-to-be-forgotten thing easily defeatable with a VPN?!).
DanBC 9y ago
> In Europe, if there's a webpage with information about you that you don't like — because it's either inaccurate or just too personal — you can make Google hide it from search results. This isn't true. You fill out a form and Google then decides whether they'll hide the information or not. It's not automatic and there's plenty of results that don't get hidden.
brightball 9y ago
We talk about search results here but reviews are the same way. People who have never interacted with you get the ability to slander and hurt brick and mortar businesses with no consequence. If you try to get Google to remove a review like that it’s basically the same story.
- slx26 9y ago
  At some point we will probably have to start considering expiry dates for digital data more seriously (or at least expiry dates for public visibility), and not only for the waste on hard drives. The problem is that nowadays is so "cheap" to not "forget", that we forget why it might be important.
  - brightball 9y ago
    Yea. I know of at least one incident where a person accused an employee of a company of something pretty terrible in their personal life...and did it as a review on the businesses site. Took 6 months to get it down IIRC.
- hultner 9y ago
  It seems like a large part of the problem is the authority we put into seemingly random information on the internet. People tend to not put the same sort of trust into banter on the street. We need to make the general public more critical to written text, the society haven't quite kept up with development of information flow.
sqdbps 9y ago
Them's the breaks. Free speech is of loftier purpose than preserving the reputation of a hedgefund guy. It's also ironic and quite frankly terrifying that a news outlet would be lamenting the extensive free speech protections in the US. This is apparently a part of a series exploring the trendy technopanic of "fake news online", which increasingly looks like a campaign by old media to reclaim their gatekeeping status even if that means thumbing their noses at the first amendment.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Them's the breaks? Lmfao. Ah, Russian shill maybe? Or just delusional Libertarian?
  - sqdbps 9y ago
    I'm both actually.
    - justherefortart 9y ago
      Comments seemed pretty spot on.
  - dang 9y ago
    This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please read and follow them when commenting here, regardless of how wrong some other commenter may be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- toss1 9y ago
  Um, NO. Free speech is one thing. It is rightly protected. But it is not unlimited, and rightly so. Libel/Slander, yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater, and incitement to riot are something different, and are not protected. Entities such as Google/FB, who serve as editors of what speech/writing/media gets propagated and featured, even though they do it by algorithm, and it might be inconvenient, must also be held to account for properly distinguishing between those types.
roadbeats 9y ago
I reported a Blogger account impersonating me more than 5 times, submitting my passport copies, never got any response from Google. Instagram is the same. Someone is impersonating my wife with her full name, we and bunch of friends reported it many times in different mediums, never had a single response.
ataturk 9y ago
Rich people problems.
known 9y ago
aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb
leroy_masochist 9y ago
This article on the Yalincak family and their history of fraud is an interesting and somewhat depressing read. http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/
- martey 9y ago
  More recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-and-a-scholar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-and-a-...
ausjke 9y ago
looks like what Europe does should be learned by google-in-the-USA, does google have the responsibility to put only true info online? or it just spits out whatever it can find? facebook says it collects private info for ads to profit so that the poor can use facebook freely, I am not rich but I'm willing to pay google for a nominal fee to get quality results while surfing, 20% users pay that fee might be enough to cover the rest 80% that can use google for free, not sure how this will work, but this sounds better to me than the $100K legal cost here.
jessaustin 9y ago
He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement. He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 42 months in prison and then deported. If one hasn't been on the wrong end of this kind of situation, one might miss the significance of this part of the story. It could be argued that NPR is actually misrepresenting this process, by omitting the certain fact that Ervine paid this "friend" tens of thousands of dollars for this FBI-as-my-own-taxpayer-supported-private-investigation-and-fast-track-to-federal-prosecution-service. Much of that money either has or will make its way back to the FBI agents who did "the work" on this case. Yes Virginia, this is corruption. Normal citizens don't have Hoover's Gang at their beck and call anytime they're disappointed by a business experience. Since FBI can generally make a case against any innocent victim who comes to their attention, it's far from clear that Yalincak ever actually did anything wrong. ("proposed a sham hedge fund"? What the hell is that?) It is clear that this Asian immigrant and his family disappointed this rich well-connected asshole WASP Ervine in some business deal, and then he spent 42 months in federal PMITAP. Any human being would be frustrated with that situation, and might even publish his account of that frustration online. (Which account seems to have disappeared into some memory hole, but maybe that's the point?) Fuck Jeff Ervine, and fuck anyone who uses his wealth to hide the fact that wealth is based on fucking people over. Question: do we think little Jeff has something to do with this URL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak
- sdoering 9y ago
  You are really making an elaborate case with your well thought out arguments and your classy choice of words. If ever one needs proof of the validity of an argumentation it would be delivered right in your style. Sorry for my cynicism here. But ad hominem cursing and the defamation of people not able to defend themselves with unproven allegations is really below the HN standards (at least I hope that to be the case). [Edit:] Typo
  - jessaustin 9y ago
thinkcomp 9y ago
Hakan Yalincak called posing as a lawyer to get his case information removed from PlainSite. Here it is: https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-family/ https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-family/
psyc 9y ago
Sci-fi author Greg Egan's comical crusade against Google, to remove misinformation about him: http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html
mattnewton 9y ago
Wait, the guy who wrote the lies about the subject of the article, what crime did he commit? The article makes it seem like he was investigated by the FBI for pretending to be rich!
- eric_h 9y ago
  Fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-student-pleads-guilty-to-fraud.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-stude...
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    Thanks, that’s pretty serious. Seems like they could have mentioned that earlier in the article.
- oicu812 9y ago
  $25 million dollar bad check among other fraud crimes. See the nymag.com link in the other comment for full details.
ben509 9y ago
Playing devil's advocate for Google, I think they're right not to remove defamatory material. There is no right to defame, per the maxim 'your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.' But there are valid cases for defamatory material to persist. The most obvious example is if you take someone to court for defamation, it's evidence and it's part of the public record. Our historical record is liable to be quite warped by all the material that's been forgotten. As long as we simply disappear defamatory or otherwise harmful speech, we don't really deal with it as a society. We really need to stop being so absurdly credulous. This guy had $100K to fix his problem. But many people don't have that, so they're vulnerable to being personally defamed.
zeveb 9y ago
This article is advocacy for the so-called 'right to be forgotten.' It's trying to convince people in the U.S. that the 'right' to be forgotten is just about forcing Google not to highlight false information. That, of course, is itself false, and to imply so is to lie by implication. The 'right' to be forgotten is about suppression of true information. E.g. if someone wants to remove information about a crime he committed from online newspapers, then he can. The 'right' to be forgotten is an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history. Americans should resist its introduction, and Europeans should fight for its abolition. It's perfectly fine to force Google to stop linking to a lie; it's completely and totally wrong to force Google to stop linking to the truth.
- wsy 9y ago
  This is a spin that Google itself wants to give this law, but by European law the search provider must weigh individual vs. public interest, and if there is valid public interest, keep the information online. See e.g. here for more background https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_delisting_not_compliant_w_public_interest_law_says_expert/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_d...
  - zeveb 9y ago
    The court case which created the so-called 'right to be forgotten' was about someone who wanted his poor credit erased from the historical record. One would imagine that there's a public interest in knowing if someone is a poor credit risk: anyone he asks for money has a need to know.
kerkeslager 9y ago
The beginning of this story is pretty interesting: > But little things bothered Ervine from the beginning. Subtle social cues seemed off. Unlike other rich people, these folks didn't talk about fancy schools or vacation destinations. Nor was there any name-dropping — social norms he had gotten used to in his dealings with the filthy rich. > "That's part of their bravado and their egos," Ervine says. "But the Turks and Caicos never came up. Art Basel never came up." > Then one night, Ervine met the family for dinner at a Victorian house converted into a farm-to-table restaurant in the New York area. After dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out on the curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab. > "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says. > He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement. > He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 42 months in prison and then deported. I'm not saying Yalincak didn't get what he deserved, but I can't help but think that if he had committed the same crimes, but coming from a rich family, he'd have gotten away with it. More to the point, it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to.
- Izkata 9y ago
  > it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to. I think you're missing some of the cues - that's only part of it. It's not just that he didn't signal wealth, but that he was inconsistent about it ("his driver would be coming to get him") and straight-up lying when he did signal it. Plus those were only three examples, no idea how much more there was.
djrogers 9y ago
Sounds like a ridiculous process, one that he probably shouldn't have had to go through. Since the underlying problem was really the blog posts search engine ranking, it seems as if it would have been better to spend about 10% of that 100K on getting a few articles written about the situation and SEOing the crap out of them. This would have had a similar effect, and made it harder for the defamer to simply recreate his site with similar effects.
sgroppino 9y ago
Could he not have moved temporarily to anywhere in the EU and, as a EU resident, asked google to take down the page from the search results?
ironjunkie 9y ago
The root of this problem is that we put too much trust into Google. It became a beast that can decide what we are and aren't supposed to see. That's why they get away with not-responding to individual requests. I said this before, but I really hope the whole privacy debate will relaunch a healthy discussion about how the big platforms are actually a bad thing all together
shthed 9y ago
Anyone got a link to the site he wanted removed?
animex 9y ago
My friend had a bunch of juvenile crap posted on "The Dirty" by ex-boyfriends which subsequently became the #1 hit on Google for her unique name. Employers/Employees would ask her about it and she always felt embarassed about it being up there. Subsequently, she disliked anyone who Google'd people. Her father paid a 3rd party company $5000 who managed to remove the link from the first page. So far it appears to have worked (1 year has passed).
sg0 9y ago
Similar to FB Newsfeed recently introducing an "i"-circle for posts by news organizations (QED), that sort of helps to verify the source, we need something similar in Google search results (that would probably make it challenging to return results within half a second).
boombox521 9y ago
The story got retracted in total by NPR: click on the NPR link. It seems that Jeffrey Ervine, the self-proclaimed anti-cyber bully advocate, had fabricated everything from start to finish, to help his Bridg-It business sell its products. Congrats NPR and all the others here! Way to go!
- boombox521 9y ago
  Here is the Jeffrey Ervine retraction by NPR. I wonder if the Bridg-It sponsors will get a note about his actions? https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-spent-100k-to-remove-a-lie-from-google https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-spent-1...

423 points by Fins 9y ago

The article fails to mention why the successful defamation suit did not result in the takedown of the website and the payment of damages.

jeremyjh 9y ago
I'm sure it didn't help that his attacker lived in Turkey.

jaytaylor 9y ago

Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. Not Quite A Classic Submarine Article (thank you for the correction, thisisit!). Just an overt marketing piece in this case. Way to go NPR.. doing the tough journalism, really pounding the pavement here. http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
I would guess most people on HN know about this PR technique, no need to point it out every time you see it. For myself I enjoyed the article. I didn't know the right to be forgotten wasn't in place in the US.
- toxicFork 9y ago
  I disagree: it is very helpful to point it out every time it's seen so that the readers will get educated, or reminded to remain critical.
- verylittlemeat 9y ago
  It should be pointed out every time to the point where HN should even include a tag on articles that are confirmed PR. Allowing these "advertisement as a story" posts to stand may already be normalized but it doesn't have to continue to be.
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    I agree that you have a point. But on the other hand, the cynical in me says that in a sense all articles are like that. Part of these articles are a plug for some startup's PR, part are a techie writing about his hobby because that builds his name and maybe lands him a client, part are big newspapers that need the traffic to sell advertising, some authors write because they want to push their ideological point of view, firms write about the latest bug because they sell security services and expect to win a contract, etc. In a sense no one writes articles expecting nothing in return.
toxicFork 9y ago
Thank you for this link, it really opens one's eyes!
raverbashing 9y ago
I don't see how this disqualifies the issues presented in the article Still, in the US it seems to be a theme "companies solving problems created by other companies being stupid", see """identity theft"""
colechristensen 9y ago
...which is the last paragraph of the article. Your comment reads like it's a secret that he's a founder of the company when that is laid out pretty clearly. >Ervine says his reputation was damaged and it hurt his career. Today, he is building a tech company called Bridg-it, to protect people like him who have been attacked online. He doesn't want anyone else to pay like he did. All told, Ervine spent about $100,000 in legal fees. In Europe, he would have just filled out a form.
- neolefty 9y ago
  Honestly I thought it added to the story. Yes, he's founding a company that seems to be aimed at cyber-bullying in schools, which sounds (1) good for society, and (2) not super-profitable. It seems more like activism-entrepreneurship than self-promotion.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    One thing that didn't really connect for me was the article seeming to indicate that he created a business to help others deal with the difficult process of getting information removed from the likes of Google, but then the business website seems to be about school issues.
    - neolefty 9y ago
      Good point. My only thought was—maybe they pivoted? The law doesn't really back up right-to-be-forgotten in the US. Cyber-bullying is a significant problem where I live, so I can believe there's a business opportunity (shudder at the phrasing) there.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
TomK32 9y ago
I thought this was an article advertising for the European Union.
thisisit 9y ago
Yes, the article does point to the fact that he's the founder of a company selling a service. But, this is not a submarine. You can look at the example quoted by Paul Graham: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/the-new-peacocks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/fashion/thursdaystyles/th... The difference is that the submarine pieces are subtle PR pieces.
- jaytaylor 9y ago
  That's a good point. Thank you.
masklinn 9y ago
> Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. Surely that makes complete sense? The bloke spent 100k on the effort, from that they can infer: 1. there's need for a middleman able to handle that for people who don't have the time or money 2. if you can do it for significantly below 100k there's lots of money to be made
gaius 9y ago
he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google He’s already a billionaire, did you miss that part? Why would he need to do sneaky PR stunts?
- retSava 9y ago
  Because there's a difference between how I read an ad versus an article. The point of submarines is to get the reader to drop parts of the defense one has against ads and be more open to the content.
appleflaxen 9y ago
great point. one wonders, though, if it's selection bias, because how could anybody who isn't an expert in this area possibly succeed in this to the point where the story becomes interesting? "normal citizen is slandered on internet and shows up in youtube" is a completely non-viable story, unfortunately.
ksk 9y ago
>Surprise surprise, he's the founder of a company selling a service to help people erase shit from google. You mean like all of the other front page links about people selling their stuff? Or people who blatantly link directly to product pages when Apple or Google or MS launches the next shiny thing? I bet if we go through your comment history we'll see that you were all up in arms when people posted those too!! >Not Quite A Classic Submarine Article (thank you for the correction, thisisit!). Just an overt marketing piece in this case. You forgot hes also wearing a very specific sweater, pants and glasses. I bet he got paid to pimp those too! Oh and and a book behind him was suspiciously placed a bit weird to attract your attention. You're totally on the right track here buddy ! /s >Way to go NPR.. doing the tough journalism, really pounding the pavement here. NPR didn't submit or upvote the article. Oh wait.. do they have bots?
fastball 9y ago
Sounds like a service Rick Santorum needed.
logfromblammo 9y ago
NPR does this sort of thing all the time. Their reputation model is built around direct public sponsorship, so they can't just run regular ads. But they also need the money, and ads are a seductive source of revenue. They are subtle enough about it that I still occasionally hear people mention that NPR or PBS doesn't have ads. Sometimes I am able to obnoxiously interject and explain what natives and submarines are, but most of the time I have to leave them to their ignorance. I am particularly annoyed whenever they are pushing music or books, because they often have this "tote bag" and "kaffeeklatsch" demographic target that doesn't always align with me. So the "cultural reporting" ads fall flat.
danso 9y ago
The article makes the case that he was inspired to create the business after suffering the problem himself. Not exactly a secret or unusual.

CaliforniaKarl 9y ago

Some background behind the comment I’m about to make: I was born in Ohio and lived in the state until, after graduating from OSU, I moved to Newport Beach (Orange County, California) for work. I only moved to the Bay Area because I didn’t get a startup-style job, although I respect the people who work in startups; I definitely wouldn’t be able to keep up. I have become extremely concerned that many people who work in the Bay Area—or who work for companies based in the Bay Area—have, in the large, forgotten that their users are fellow human beings. I am turning more and more to the belief that _everyone_ in a company needs to have some unfiltered interaction with the company’s users on a regular basis. Separating out the support process (to automation, to contractors, etc.) makes it easy to forget you’re not writing code to serve robots, you’re writing code to serve people.

vinceguidry 9y ago
Something clicked in me when I read the story of how Bill Gates used to wander into the support center from time to time and take a few calls. If and when I start a business, everybody is going to wear all the hats, for as long as that can be kept up. All developers do support. No job is so unimportant that the CEO can't jump in and pick up some slack. Everybody needs to be reminded that this is a large operation with lots of moving pieces, but at the end of it is a customer with real needs getting served by your efforts.
- ConceptJunkie 9y ago
  That works great for a small company, but once you find that overall productivity increases proportional to the square root of headcount, it will become less and less feasible.
  - vinceguidry 9y ago
    That's fine. Hopefully by then it'll get ingrained into the culture.
gambiting 9y ago
I work for a large games company(as a programmer) and recently visited our customer support centre - man, it really hit hard realizing how much impact our product has on people, and how shielded you can be as a programmer from this impact. They played some calls for us, where people weren't even upset that our game wasn't working or the servers were down - they were just sad, they were at a difficult moment in their lives and our games would cheer them up, or they took a day off work to play, or they were ill and playing multiplayer with their friends was a highlight of their day - it just made me realize that if we break something, people care, and not just in a "I paid my money I want my game!!!" kind of way. As a programmer you work through your list of tasks and go home, especially in large companies the impact of what you do is hiding behind layers of customer support, community managers etc, where if it filters down to you it's already been diluted to a sterile bug description at best.

jon_richards 9y ago

Personal feelings aside, I think this is quite indicative of European and the US values. The US generally values the freedom to, while Europe values freedom from. Things obviously get more complicated when multiple parties are in play, but those seem like the fundamental properties on which the laws are built.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
Which is ironic since freedoms as specified in the american constitution are freedoms from. It does not grant people freedoms, instead it assumes as evident that people have those freedoms and imposes limitations on the government to infringe those freedoms.
- PeterisP 9y ago
  The problem is that it only imposes limitations on the government to infringe those freedoms; while an affirmative "freedom from X" guarantee applies to everyone who might infringe that freedom. Your fellow citizens can be just as harmful to your freedoms as the gov't; and actually maintaining any freedom requires actively limiting the freedom of other people to infringe on that, and enforcing that limitation.
  - jakeogh 9y ago
    How? Less gov limitations? You cant have it both ways. Limits on government force are inverse to limits on it's people. The Bill Of Rights is a list of things we want to remember that the gov can never do (see it's preamble), it's a bit of a bug that it's called that. Gov is special, we _give_ it the ability to use violence to enforce the rules we set. Corporations don't get to use violence to enforce their rules (unless they buy the gov in a country without the 2ndA). It's a real difference. We are not forced to use a private service (which is why conservatives are so anti forced "health care"), nobody is required to use FB, or YT. Only confused (or ill) people think they are. A properly functioning system of exchange regulates this via monetary physics. FB is going to be myspace sooner or later. People learn from their mistakes if they have the freedom to make them.

lordnacho 9y ago

If he were to move to Europe, would Google remove the results for him, worldwide?

joopxiv 9y ago
No, only from the European versions of Google. Google is actually sued by the French government because they feel that searches for French citizens should be censored based on the EU law on Google worldwide. Which to a certain extend makes sense because right now, if you see the red text mentioned in the article you can just visit the US version of the site to find the original results. However, if it would be China, Russia or any other authoritarian regime demanding that Google would censor their international engine, I think the sentiment would be quite different.
- zaarn 9y ago
  I think if it happened then Google or search engines in general would quickly splinter into regional alternatives that provide whatever is allowed in their jurisdiction.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This is the current behavior, but Google has received significant legal pushback from that stance. Canada's Supreme Court has also ruled that Google must remove results about their citizens globally. Google, looking for a friendly court, decided to ask the Northern District of California for an injunction preventing them from complying with the order, and California, true to form, issued such an injunction. Of course, the Northen District of California doesn't have jurisdiction over the Supreme Court of Canada, so by my read, Google is currently in violation of a court order in Canada. As far as I know though, Canada hasn't taken this any further yet. http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/ http://fortune.com/2017/06/28/canada-supreme-court-google/
  - amarkov 9y ago
    The Supreme Court had noted in their ruling that, if Google were to show that it is in fact illegal in their home jurisdiction to comply with the order, that would change the analysis. Courts are generally pretty willing to engage in comity analysis; they understand there's a problem when a Canadian court orders an American company to violate American law.

merb 9y ago

> In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine's results had been altered well the search results ARE altered. google actually needs to save more data to hide a search result. it's silly that people attack google instead of the source. also if a single website tells a lie about somebody it's probably not a good source since a SINGLE website is never a good source. In european the cases were different and that's why I think "the right to be forgotten" is a dumb idea. actually official media outlets and newspapers had an article published about a guy who did something bad 15 years ago. written letters that is protected by most european law. however the guy didn't want that his bad history will be revelead so he sued. from than on everything started. here are my problems with the whole: * he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody * it's actually easier to restore trust by having a bad and a good article publish (i.e. if people change you could maybe find some writes who writes good things about you) * hiding search results won't hide the truth, it just makes it harder to access, which basically means nothing is forgotten it's just harder to find, how bad people were in the past actually there is a lot of stuff why the current system is bad.

bkor 9y ago
> he actually WAS an bad actor in the past, so it's still hard to trust somebody If you don't forgive/forget, there is no incentive for the person to behave differently. E.g. if someone once was involved with the police and as a result cannot get any proper job anymore, how would this individual ever change? Some countries seem to focused on punishing people for the rest of their lives. This sometimes under the assumption that people actually consider the impact of their actions before do it. Further, if a person is considered to be/treated as a criminal all the time then eventually they'll just behave as one.
- AlgorithmicTime 9y ago
  You forgive, you don't forget. You can't have a society where we just sweep people's past history under the rug. The only clues we have to future actions and intents are past actions.
- 9y ago

aiCeivi9 9y ago

I don't like how they idealize EU law. It is actually used by people that have something to hide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten#Criticis... . I would prefer it to be on case-by-case basis, not automated process.

karma_fountain 9y ago
From that wiki article, 95% are people wishing to protect their personal and private information. If the links are in the public interest then they are not removed. The only issue I see is that it is Google deciding on what is in the public interest, which granted is quite disturbing.
- brownbat 9y ago
  The original right to be forgotten case was about how a guy in Spain couldn't get cheap credit because of past defaults. It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not someone has defaulted in the past. It allows society to lend money at reasonable rates. And it's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish newspaper that originally published had no obligation to remove this information, but the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing publication should change how it does business. There were no new rules for the Spanish government. That very government literally ordered the publication as a matter of public interest in the first place. Why change anything at the source? If someone were cynical, they might suspect the right to be forgotten had a touch of protectionism baked into its rationale, alongside the European idealism.
  - tremon 9y ago
    It arguably is in the public interest for creditors to know whether or not someone has defaulted in the past. Seems that that mainly is in the creditors' interest, not the public's. And it's interesting that the European court found that the Spanish newspaper that originally published had no obligation to remove this information, but the foreign tech company that simply relays this existing publication should change how it does business. You're being willfully obtuse here. If you know exactly what the European Court ordered, you also know its rationale -- and thus know that it had nothing to do with national vs foreign.

ikeboy 9y ago

Somewhat ironically, it took me about a minute to find a ripoff report claiming some contractor was stiffed working on Bridg-it for several thousand. The name behind that complaint appears to be a real person, with an active twitter account with hundreds of followers and over a thousand tweets.

jessaustin 9y ago
Sounds like a job for Bridg-it!

scandox 9y ago

> After dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out on the curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab. > "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says. I know the context somewhat justifies his reaction but still it's very funny to think of a world in which getting into a taxi prompts the person you're meeting with to contact law enforcement...I mean what if his driver just got caught in traffic? What if he decided he wanted to ditch the driver and have some privacy? Instead his dinner host is watching him out a window and decides his choice of transport is suspect?

PostOnce 9y ago
Maybe he was put on guard by the guy mentioning his driver at all? It might be suspect to mention your driver at all if it is in fact a normal occurrence.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  TFA said that Ervine was suspicious because of how little Yalincak had flexed about all his awesome possessions and privileges. It's possible that really rich people really are assholes.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > It's possible that really rich people really are assholes. More charitably, just as poorer folks talk about the cool beer they had last week or the really great movie they saw, maybe rich folks talk about the brewery they just bought or their race horse's recent win. Different sums of money allow one different pleasures in life. There's nothing assholish about that.
    - txsh 9y ago
      You’ve never had a conversation with a poor person, have you?
  - PostOnce 9y ago

candiodari 9y ago

I find it baffling that this guy gets any support here at all: 1) he actually has the money to spend on this. He doesn't have a problem. 2) he's advertising his own company, and it's a typical scam : he's advertising his ability to take information about someone down ... 3) Needless to say, this person is selling "his services" to things like K-12 schools (read: customers that pay, but don't want to pay, and how much do you want to bet they never see any of that service they paid for, but never wanted ?)

phonebucket 9y ago

"It looked like he had something to hide, not like Google had made the mistake of highlighting false information." That quote explains a lot of the misunderstanding. Google's service should to be help a user find what they are looking for within the constraints of Google's legal obligations. Google's job should not be to police the accuracy of information.

neolefty 9y ago
And yet Google does want accurate information to show up higher, in general. It's a hard problem.

alex_duf 9y ago

>There's no humanity or kindness in Google. It's not about anyone else. It's all about Google I've said it before, and I'll say it again Technology is the mirror of humanity. We somehow don't like the face we see but we blame the mirror. Not that google is spotless, but really that shit show is just a reflection of how poor our humanity is in the first place.

exikyut 9y ago

> In fact, even after Google stopped listing the defamatory site, the search page added a disclaimer — in red letters — that Ervine's results had been altered. Whoa. I wouldn't mind seeing a screenshot of that!

yosamino 9y ago
It's not red anymore, but I remember having seen it before https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V https://imgur.com/a/n7g9V (link goes here: https://policies.google.com/faq https://policies.google.com/faq) Google also does this in response to DMCA requests, the difference being that for the right-to-be-forgotten thing, there is no way to see what was removed. For DMCA takedowns, google hosts and links to the specific DMCA request, wich contains the URLs that were removed, rendering the while process somewhat moot.
- exikyut 9y ago
  Interesting. That's a Europe-specific snippet though (incidentally I've never seen that before; do I need to be in Europle to see it - is the right-to-be-forgotten thing easily defeatable with a VPN?!).

DanBC 9y ago

> In Europe, if there's a webpage with information about you that you don't like — because it's either inaccurate or just too personal — you can make Google hide it from search results. This isn't true. You fill out a form and Google then decides whether they'll hide the information or not. It's not automatic and there's plenty of results that don't get hidden.

brightball 9y ago

We talk about search results here but reviews are the same way. People who have never interacted with you get the ability to slander and hurt brick and mortar businesses with no consequence. If you try to get Google to remove a review like that it’s basically the same story.

slx26 9y ago
At some point we will probably have to start considering expiry dates for digital data more seriously (or at least expiry dates for public visibility), and not only for the waste on hard drives. The problem is that nowadays is so "cheap" to not "forget", that we forget why it might be important.
- brightball 9y ago
  Yea. I know of at least one incident where a person accused an employee of a company of something pretty terrible in their personal life...and did it as a review on the businesses site. Took 6 months to get it down IIRC.
hultner 9y ago
It seems like a large part of the problem is the authority we put into seemingly random information on the internet. People tend to not put the same sort of trust into banter on the street. We need to make the general public more critical to written text, the society haven't quite kept up with development of information flow.

sqdbps 9y ago

Them's the breaks. Free speech is of loftier purpose than preserving the reputation of a hedgefund guy. It's also ironic and quite frankly terrifying that a news outlet would be lamenting the extensive free speech protections in the US. This is apparently a part of a series exploring the trendy technopanic of "fake news online", which increasingly looks like a campaign by old media to reclaim their gatekeeping status even if that means thumbing their noses at the first amendment.

justherefortart 9y ago
Them's the breaks? Lmfao. Ah, Russian shill maybe? Or just delusional Libertarian?
- sqdbps 9y ago
  I'm both actually.
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Comments seemed pretty spot on.
- dang 9y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. Please read and follow them when commenting here, regardless of how wrong some other commenter may be. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
toss1 9y ago
Um, NO. Free speech is one thing. It is rightly protected. But it is not unlimited, and rightly so. Libel/Slander, yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater, and incitement to riot are something different, and are not protected. Entities such as Google/FB, who serve as editors of what speech/writing/media gets propagated and featured, even though they do it by algorithm, and it might be inconvenient, must also be held to account for properly distinguishing between those types.

roadbeats 9y ago

I reported a Blogger account impersonating me more than 5 times, submitting my passport copies, never got any response from Google. Instagram is the same. Someone is impersonating my wife with her full name, we and bunch of friends reported it many times in different mediums, never had a single response.

ataturk 9y ago

Rich people problems.

known 9y ago

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

leroy_masochist 9y ago

This article on the Yalincak family and their history of fraud is an interesting and somewhat depressing read. http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/ http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12070/

martey 9y ago
More recently: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-and-a-scholar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/nyregion/an-inmate-and-a-...

ausjke 9y ago

looks like what Europe does should be learned by google-in-the-USA, does google have the responsibility to put only true info online? or it just spits out whatever it can find? facebook says it collects private info for ads to profit so that the poor can use facebook freely, I am not rich but I'm willing to pay google for a nominal fee to get quality results while surfing, 20% users pay that fee might be enough to cover the rest 80% that can use google for free, not sure how this will work, but this sounds better to me than the $100K legal cost here.

jessaustin 9y ago

He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement. He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 42 months in prison and then deported. If one hasn't been on the wrong end of this kind of situation, one might miss the significance of this part of the story. It could be argued that NPR is actually misrepresenting this process, by omitting the certain fact that Ervine paid this "friend" tens of thousands of dollars for this FBI-as-my-own-taxpayer-supported-private-investigation-and-fast-track-to-federal-prosecution-service. Much of that money either has or will make its way back to the FBI agents who did "the work" on this case. Yes Virginia, this is corruption. Normal citizens don't have Hoover's Gang at their beck and call anytime they're disappointed by a business experience. Since FBI can generally make a case against any innocent victim who comes to their attention, it's far from clear that Yalincak ever actually did anything wrong. ("proposed a sham hedge fund"? What the hell is that?) It is clear that this Asian immigrant and his family disappointed this rich well-connected asshole WASP Ervine in some business deal, and then he spent 42 months in federal PMITAP. Any human being would be frustrated with that situation, and might even publish his account of that frustration online. (Which account seems to have disappeared into some memory hole, but maybe that's the point?) Fuck Jeff Ervine, and fuck anyone who uses his wealth to hide the fact that wealth is based on fucking people over. Question: do we think little Jeff has something to do with this URL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakan_Yalincak

sdoering 9y ago
You are really making an elaborate case with your well thought out arguments and your classy choice of words. If ever one needs proof of the validity of an argumentation it would be delivered right in your style. Sorry for my cynicism here. But ad hominem cursing and the defamation of people not able to defend themselves with unproven allegations is really below the HN standards (at least I hope that to be the case). [Edit:] Typo
- jessaustin 9y ago

thinkcomp 9y ago

Hakan Yalincak called posing as a lawyer to get his case information removed from PlainSite. Here it is: https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-family/ https://www.plainsite.org/tags/yalincak-crime-family/

psyc 9y ago

Sci-fi author Greg Egan's comical crusade against Google, to remove misinformation about him: http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/GOOGLE/Google.html

mattnewton 9y ago

Wait, the guy who wrote the lies about the subject of the article, what crime did he commit? The article makes it seem like he was investigated by the FBI for pretending to be rich!

eric_h 9y ago
Fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-student-pleads-guilty-to-fraud.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/nyregion/former-nyu-stude...
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Thanks, that’s pretty serious. Seems like they could have mentioned that earlier in the article.
oicu812 9y ago
$25 million dollar bad check among other fraud crimes. See the nymag.com link in the other comment for full details.

ben509 9y ago

Playing devil's advocate for Google, I think they're right not to remove defamatory material. There is no right to defame, per the maxim 'your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.' But there are valid cases for defamatory material to persist. The most obvious example is if you take someone to court for defamation, it's evidence and it's part of the public record. Our historical record is liable to be quite warped by all the material that's been forgotten. As long as we simply disappear defamatory or otherwise harmful speech, we don't really deal with it as a society. We really need to stop being so absurdly credulous. This guy had $100K to fix his problem. But many people don't have that, so they're vulnerable to being personally defamed.

zeveb 9y ago

This article is advocacy for the so-called 'right to be forgotten.' It's trying to convince people in the U.S. that the 'right' to be forgotten is just about forcing Google not to highlight false information. That, of course, is itself false, and to imply so is to lie by implication. The 'right' to be forgotten is about suppression of true information. E.g. if someone wants to remove information about a crime he committed from online newspapers, then he can. The 'right' to be forgotten is an Orwellian attempt to rewrite history. Americans should resist its introduction, and Europeans should fight for its abolition. It's perfectly fine to force Google to stop linking to a lie; it's completely and totally wrong to force Google to stop linking to the truth.

wsy 9y ago
This is a spin that Google itself wants to give this law, but by European law the search provider must weigh individual vs. public interest, and if there is valid public interest, keep the information online. See e.g. here for more background https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_delisting_not_compliant_w_public_interest_law_says_expert/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/04/google_peston_bbc_d...
- zeveb 9y ago
  The court case which created the so-called 'right to be forgotten' was about someone who wanted his poor credit erased from the historical record. One would imagine that there's a public interest in knowing if someone is a poor credit risk: anyone he asks for money has a need to know.

kerkeslager 9y ago

The beginning of this story is pretty interesting: > But little things bothered Ervine from the beginning. Subtle social cues seemed off. Unlike other rich people, these folks didn't talk about fancy schools or vacation destinations. Nor was there any name-dropping — social norms he had gotten used to in his dealings with the filthy rich. > "That's part of their bravado and their egos," Ervine says. "But the Turks and Caicos never came up. Art Basel never came up." > Then one night, Ervine met the family for dinner at a Victorian house converted into a farm-to-table restaurant in the New York area. After dessert, Yalincak said his driver would be coming to get him. But out on the curb, Ervine spotted him jumping into a beat-up cab. > "The hair stood up on the back of my neck," Ervine says. > He called a friend — a military veteran with contacts at the FBI — and soon the bureau unearthed a suspicious legal trail and launched a criminal investigation. In that case, Ervine handed over the information he had collected on the family and spoke with law enforcement. > He thought the matter was over. Yalincak was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 42 months in prison and then deported. I'm not saying Yalincak didn't get what he deserved, but I can't help but think that if he had committed the same crimes, but coming from a rich family, he'd have gotten away with it. More to the point, it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to.

Izkata 9y ago
> it's disturbing to me that even if a person weren't committing fraud, they might be viewed suspiciously simply because they didn't signal wealth in the ways wealthy people expect them to. I think you're missing some of the cues - that's only part of it. It's not just that he didn't signal wealth, but that he was inconsistent about it ("his driver would be coming to get him") and straight-up lying when he did signal it. Plus those were only three examples, no idea how much more there was.

djrogers 9y ago

Sounds like a ridiculous process, one that he probably shouldn't have had to go through. Since the underlying problem was really the blog posts search engine ranking, it seems as if it would have been better to spend about 10% of that 100K on getting a few articles written about the situation and SEOing the crap out of them. This would have had a similar effect, and made it harder for the defamer to simply recreate his site with similar effects.

sgroppino 9y ago

Could he not have moved temporarily to anywhere in the EU and, as a EU resident, asked google to take down the page from the search results?

ironjunkie 9y ago

The root of this problem is that we put too much trust into Google. It became a beast that can decide what we are and aren't supposed to see. That's why they get away with not-responding to individual requests. I said this before, but I really hope the whole privacy debate will relaunch a healthy discussion about how the big platforms are actually a bad thing all together

shthed 9y ago

Anyone got a link to the site he wanted removed?

animex 9y ago

My friend had a bunch of juvenile crap posted on "The Dirty" by ex-boyfriends which subsequently became the #1 hit on Google for her unique name. Employers/Employees would ask her about it and she always felt embarassed about it being up there. Subsequently, she disliked anyone who Google'd people. Her father paid a 3rd party company $5000 who managed to remove the link from the first page. So far it appears to have worked (1 year has passed).

sg0 9y ago

Similar to FB Newsfeed recently introducing an "i"-circle for posts by news organizations (QED), that sort of helps to verify the source, we need something similar in Google search results (that would probably make it challenging to return results within half a second).

boombox521 9y ago

The story got retracted in total by NPR: click on the NPR link. It seems that Jeffrey Ervine, the self-proclaimed anti-cyber bully advocate, had fabricated everything from start to finish, to help his Bridg-It business sell its products. Congrats NPR and all the others here! Way to go!

boombox521 9y ago
Here is the Jeffrey Ervine retraction by NPR. I wonder if the Bridg-It sponsors will get a note about his actions? https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-spent-100k-to-remove-a-lie-from-google https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/598239092/the-man-who-spent-1...