7 ms·

Address the problem, not the symptoms. The problem is at the platform level, so regulate platforms like Facebook. Search engines simply search what they scrape.

• mynewtb 9y ago
  So someone posted a real photo of 'Eric driving drunk' to the web. Eric did not approve of that in any way and wants it gone. The someone could not care less. What is the solution in your model?
  • mjevans 9y ago
    A prospective Eric could engage in some formal process to require distinctive detail be added to that 'accusation' so that it does not defame the Eric which did not drive drunk.
  • losteric 9y ago
    Contact the platform to demand removal. The porn industry has SOPs for dealing with this problem, I am not a lawyer but I imagine that process can be generalized and legally enforced If that someone shared it on their own website, hosted out-of-country, on their own hardware... well, I can't do anything about that but i also wouldn't care. It's clearly non-authoritative and won't get SEO traction by itself.
    • 1337biz 9y ago
      So you want a US based Google where only US based content is ranked?
      • losteric 9y ago
        Well that's a red herring, what made you jump to that conclusion?
  • guelo 9y ago
    If Google didn't post it why would you go after Google? Tell whoever posted it or whoever is hosting it to take it down.
    • 1337biz 9y ago
      Because Google makes it easy to find. Nobody cares about some rant about you by an anonymous customer, or just your ex partner when it is on page 73. But if it is on page 1 and the other party refuses to take it down you just feed an endless army of lawyers.
      • losteric 9y ago
        There are other search engines and data aggregators. Making Google hide things just gives victims false peace of mind... The problem is still there.
      • acct1771 9y ago
        That's when you get your page, with your side of the story, ranked #2, or at least page 1. That's the nature of the internet. The great equalizer
    • spunker540 9y ago
      The problem isn’t that the content exists- it’s that google surfaces it.
      • losteric 9y ago
        "The problem isn't that someone lit my house on fire - it's that I can see the fire"
        • askmike 9y ago
          Closer to "The problem isn't that I bought a fridge, the problem is that it malfunctioned and my house burned down." The problem is the content showing up when searching for someone's name, not that there is an article on a website somewhere.
  • lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
    Well maybe Eric shouldn't have "driven drunk"? Im not sure why search providers should be held accountable for protecting the carefully curated (false) reputations of individuals. All of the "right to be forgotten" arguments seem to devolve to "people shouldn't be able to know any data points that would negatively effect my social standings".
    • petre 9y ago
      What if someone posts libelous information about Eric and uses SEO to make it show up on page 1 of Google's search results?
      • ragequitta 9y ago
        Even more troubling is deep fake technology that's run rampant. Should a serious director never hire Emma Watson again because she's such a prominent porn actress? Of course "we all know" that's fake. But how would we ever know Eric's stuff is fake?
        • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
          > But how would we ever know Eric's stuff is fake? Isn't that a point in the other direction? The existence of convincing fakes will teach people not to believe everything they see on the internet.
      • khedoros1 9y ago
        Depends if in the scenario you're imagining, "libelous" implies false, or just damaging.
  • dingo_bat 9y ago
    Take them to court. Or learn to accept it.
    • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      So you would rather only the rich can afford to protect themselves? RTBF makes it possible for ordinary citizens who can't afford fancy lawyers to fight big corporations to seek redress. This is one of the reasons its so important.
      • dingo_bat 9y ago
        > So you would rather only the rich can afford to protect themselves? Does Europe not have the concept of a court-appointed lawyer? > RTBF makes it possible for ordinary citizens who can't afford fancy lawyers to fight big corporations to seek redress. No it makes it possible for criminals to hide their criminality. To be very blunt, if I were an employer, I don't want to hire a murderer. I don't care if he/she was convicted and served their time. Once you have committed murder, I will not hire you. I will not deal with you in any way. Hiding/obfuscating true information from me is wrong. Criminality is public record. It should be easily accessible.
        • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
          Court appointed lawyers are for criminal cases, not civil ones. This is pretty common across legal systems, AFAIK. RTBF does not protect murderers, this is a fundamental lack of knowledge of the law and its clearly marked boundaries.
        • aspaceman 9y ago
          > Does Europe not have the concept of a court-appointed lawyer? Not sure you understand how court-appointed attorneys work. First off, you can't use one to sue someone else since you can only get a court-appointed attorney when you're being charged in a criminal suit. Second, court-appointed attorneys suck. They are underpaid, overworked, and unable to properly do their jobs as is. Requiring legal action would indeed create a scenario where only the rich bring such cases to trial.
  • greglindahl 9y ago
    Search engines only show what's posted by other people, so while they're a convenient target, they aren't the actual bad actor. Our legal system tends to attack actual bad actors, not convenient targets. Unless the Internet is involved. The way RTBF and DMCA work, search engines bear 100% of the cost, and people don't ever go after the actual bad actors. By the way, in the US, if Tabloid X publishes Eric's photo, that's 100% legal thanks to the First Amendment, as long as the photographer agrees. Eric has no part. Attacking search engines on behalf of Eric, in the US, not so cool. Europe doesn't have free speech, so, no problem.
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > The way RTBF and DMCA work, search engines bear 100% of the cost, and people don't ever go after the actual bad actors. RBTF, maybe, but how is the DMCA this way? Certainly not the takedown notice/counternotice provision, which doesn't create new liability, only a special shield from any pre-existing liability.
      • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        > how is the DMCA this way? Certainly not the takedown notice/counternotice provision, which doesn't create new liability, only a special shield from any pre-existing liability. The problem is that the shield has value to the search engine in excess of the cost to the search engine (but not the cost to the censorship victim) of removing the information. It reduces their risk, even when the risk is low because they would be likely to win, and removes the cost of having to litigate the issue even if they do win, so the search engine takes the deal and then executes ~all the notices even when they're bogus. Which is a direct cost to the censorship victim compared to handling it the way Section 230 does it, and an indirect cost to the search engine because it has them paying to process the removal of legitimate information and reduces the value of their service to customers -- just not enough of an indirect cost to give them the incentive to refuse, because the brunt of the cost is on the third party being censored.
        • greglindahl 9y ago
• mjevans 9y ago
  The web should be considered WRITE ONLY. We should NOT remove content. However, that doesn't mean that annotating content or making it more clear that a different (Firstname Lastname) did something might be a better response. For example, I have never created an account on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc. I refuse to give any one company a defacto monopoly over social discourse and interaction; those tools belong on OPEN, FREE (libre+beer), well defined minimum interoperable standard platforms. Currently that's email; it really sucks, but the standard is well defined, anyone /can/ implement it without barriers, and everyone is forced to federate to at least some degree.
  • losteric 9y ago
    "the web" ... all of it? That seems impratical. Immutable data structures have their place in programming, and immutable communication has it's place in society, but neither are appropriate for all use-cases.
  • zeth___ 9y ago
    >The web should be considered WRITE ONLY. We should NOT remove content. It isn't and it has never been. Given that different countries have different laws and yet all claim to universal application of their laws can you imagine how many people would be killed because of this? Atheists taken off planes form Arab Emirates flights because they posted about god. Homosexual activists getting assassinated by Russia. Europeans being arrested in the US because of the difference in age of consent. The web is ephemeral and should be anonymous.
    • paulie_a 9y ago
      The web has and never will be anonymous, things might disappear due to lack of interest. But you just can't unring the bell either.
• bringtheaction 9y ago
  > If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content. “Just delete it”. Except have you ever personally been in the situation that you needed something removed? I have and: 1) You might not even have the password to every random account you created in the past, nor the e-mail addresses that you used when you created those profiles, nor maybe even remember what e-mail address you used for each of them. 2) Turns out that there are a lot of sites out there that copy and preserve a lot of random data from other sites. They do so without regards to the ToS of the site you originally posted to. They do not care about copyright. They do not respond to personal requests for removal of data. They do not respond to DMCA notices. They are outside of the jurisdiction of the country you live in and as are their hosting providers. And even if they are cooperative, there are so many of them that reaching out to all of them and following up on the removal will require much much more time and energy than what you have available. So then the best you can do is delete what you can and submit the rest for removal from Google. “Well you shouldn’t have posted it in the first place if you didn’t want it to be public”, right? No, it’s not that simple! The things you post today can be taken out of context and misinterpreted by someone in the future in ways you would never have imagined today. We keep posting comments, pictures, videos, creating profiles, liking and sharing posts and information, but most of us rarely delete any of it. As the amount of data increases, so does the room for cherry picking data about you to build up an image of you that while true in the sense that all of it are things you posted, wildly misrepresents what kind of person you are, and on top of this misrepresentation and even more inaccurate image can be painted. If you had any idea what it feels like to have that happen to you, I think you would want to be able to have some of that information at the very least removed from search results. Once it’s gone from search, it’s gone from the public eye. And if you are lucky you are able to erase the bits of information that ties the data to you so that even if the data resurfaces in the future it is no longer connected to you, or at least not as directly. Furthermore, when you are working on having information removed you should first make a list of all of the information, then have it removed from Google ASAP so that 1) it gets harder to find as soon as possible and 2) so that the information is not retained in the publicly available caches of search engines after it’s been deleted from the source sites. Beyond that, for the information that you could not get deleted but which you were able to have removed from search results, some of it will eventually disappear all together on its own because of bitrot (hardware failures, data management errors, sites going out of business, etc) and some of it will probably stick around forever. But like I said you want as much of it removed as possible and you want the rest of it to be hard to find and you want as much of it as possible to lose connection to you. And achieving that requires the cooperation of the search engines in removing results.
• tzs 9y ago
  > * If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content. ...and I read that tweet in 2007, and quoted it in a blog post on my obscure, low traffic blog. Google will still find it. > * Uphold social media to the same standards of traditional media, requiring truth and propagation of redactions and corrections. Libel and slander are well-established concepts. What about the case where the damaging content is true? A key thing here is that what is acceptable changes over time. Something that can be a life ruining social faux pas today may have been pretty normal 20 years ago, and many people today won't accept the "oh, that was normal back then" explanation. We used to be able to avoid these problems because it took effort to dig up records from 20 years ago, and from low circulation sources like local newspapers. So, for example, if you did stupid things in your home town that ended up in your high school newspaper, and then 20 years later were applying for a job in a city in another state...the employer would probably not find that high school newspaper, even if you were applying for a fairly sensitive job in an industry like finance. That's because to find things like that they would have to actually send someone to visit your high school library and comb through their archives of the high school newspaper. That's just too expensive to do routinely for job applicants, except for the most sensitive positions. Nowadays, all that stuff ends up online from the start, and it is cheap and easy to find. > * Demand discretion from friends. In college, my group had a strict "no-camera" rule when it came to embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. My parent's generation had the same rule. All it takes is one person in the group to slip up, or for you to overlook one third party who is not part of your agreement and who can see you. So really, the rule has to be don't undertake embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. (And as I noted above, standards for what is embarrassing or unlawful can change over time, so it really needs to be don't do anything that could conceivably become embarrassing or unlawful in the next 50 or so years). Essentially we used to balance privacy vs. public access kind of automatically, due to the limitations we had in information storage, indexing, and retrieval. We've removed most of those limitations, so the balance has been lost.