8 ms·

Possibly controversial proposition, which I offer as a discussion prompt, not necessarily a position: What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing in

• etskinner 5y ago
  Looking at the other side of the spectrum, do you think we should still have information available online about prominent people? Politicians, historical figures, etc.? If so, where do you draw the line between people whose information is useful to the public and people who shouldn't be cataloged?
  • Hizonner 5y ago
    If somebody is seeking a position of power and/or trust from the public, then the public should get the same information about that person that we'd allow an employer to ask for about a prospective employee. So their qualifications for the job, how they intend to do the job, how they've done in similar jobs before, and how they've handled similar types of trust in the past. Otherwise, frankly, fuck the public.
  • _moof 5y ago
    Indeed, that's a very difficult line to draw. In the US we have the concept of a public figure, and I'll admit I have no idea how that's actually defined. That being said I've also wondered if it's too blunt a concept. Are public figures entitled to any privacy, and if so, where is that line? I see celebrities being hounded by paparazzi while trying to go about their daily lives, for example, and while I understand the principles behind why that's legal, I have to imagine it's a real drag.
    • ghaff 5y ago
      See New York Times v. Sullivan (US SCOTUS) I haven't checked the exact wording of this definition but, as a summary, "The Supreme Court has defined public figures as those who hold government office and those who have achieved a role of special prominence in the affairs of society by reason of notoriety of their achievements or vigor and success with which they seek public's attention. "
    • germanier 5y ago
      In Germany we draw the line on what type of information the person in question makes public by their own choice. Do you invite tabloids for a home story and let them take pictures? Then other pictures of your home can be published. If you on the other hand never talk about your home and family publicly let alone invite media in, that can remain private. In addition, if the information is relevant to a larger topic (e.g. a corruption scandal involving a politician's home) then you can show anything relevant to that.
    • zabatuvajdka 5y ago
      .
• ProAm 5y ago
  A better way to phrase that question is: Do you like the ability to print money while others feed the money machine for you? This will never go away without regulatory intervention. Too much money in it, too much control, and control leads to power.
  • Majestic121 5y ago
    You're already arguing that it is desirable to stop this indexation : it's far from obvious, and the question from OP is precisely whether we should try to make it go away or not, not whether it's possible.
    • ProAm 5y ago
      It's not possible.
• ciguy 5y ago
  While Google does this publicly, there are tons of private indexes doing the same thing for marketing, intelligence and other purposes. As long as people keep posting things online someone will be collecting that info and trying to make money off of it.
• fzzzy 5y ago
  We could do this by shifting the bulk of online communication to private/ephemeral spaces. The stuff that wants to be cataloged and searched would just be whatever is left in public. I am pro.
• ghaff 5y ago
  Assuming someone starts covering their online tracks from an early age they can probably largely keep their online presence at a minimum with some caveats. - You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting - You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence - There are certainly situations where many of us have a public presence under our real names. If you ever speak at most conferences for example or publish an article or paper.
  • thomasahle 5y ago
    > You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting Most countries do fine without mandatory surveillance based credit reporting. And banks still gave out loans before credit cards.
    • mixmastamyk 5y ago
      How does it work?
      • thomasahle 5y ago
        When you apply for a loan you have to submit information about previous loans, taxes and payslips. That contains most of the useful information in credit scores anyway.
  • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Two sources of personal information leaks that are difficult to counteract are voter registration and USPS change of address, both of which are publicly available. In the case of voter registration, as soon as I updated my phone number last year, I went from no spam to getting dozens of SMS spam message per day. About 80% of it was political but the other 20% is the standard scam spam. The political spam mostly ended after the election (there's sometimes fund raising pleas) but the scam stuff continues on. The USPS change of address information quickly ends up on all of those "Your Life" type sites. It's frustrating that such basic government functions end up making it easier for others to track and prey on you.
• titzer 5y ago
  It wouldn't have been controversial just one generation in the past. For example, prior to the 1990s when this became technically feasible, people would have thought this was downright creepy and would have clamored to ban the practice preemptively. It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers whose meteoric growth was celebrated by all power structures.
  • floatingatoll 5y ago
    We had X-No-Archive: YES throughout the 90s, which thankfully DejaNews honored (up until Google purchased them in 2001, anyways). Search engines are destroying the social fabric of humanity, making it possible for haters to hate with perfect precision. We've been on the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now, and we've earned today's toxic and deadly Internet that resulted from it. Oh well.
    • lstamour 5y ago
      In defence of search engines, when content disappears from the web, it disappears from the search index within months. And robots.txt has been a thing since forever. But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.
      • floatingatoll 5y ago
        If I ever again post a website, I’m going to post it with basic auth, so that search engines won’t index it to begin with. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills, after all.
      • Sanzig 5y ago
        > And robots.txt has been a thing since forever. Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files. Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself. I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look. [1] http://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt http://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
• TheRealPomax 5y ago
  small counter: that's not what google does. How many times has anyone clicked on the "next page" when it comes to search results? Which is another problem Google refuses to fix: if you're not in the top 10, you're not on the internet as far as the rest of the internet can tell.
• judge2020 5y ago
  It’s only instantly searchable if it’s public. The only place you can’t control this is when family members or friends take pictures and insist on uploading them to Facebook as public pictures, when the implication of not taking a picture/imposing stipulations are negative.
• leetcrew 5y ago
  I don't actually think having hits for your name through google is the most pressing privacy issue we face today. if I can find you by searching your name, one of two things is likely true: 1) you have opted in to indexing by having a public facebook, linkedin, etc., or 2) your name has appeared in a news article. the solution to 1) is pretty simple; don't have public profiles with your real name if you don't want to be indexed. 2) is a more subtle issue, but is more of an issue with news articles than google.
  • Retric 5y ago
    There are many ways your photo can be made public that have nothing to do with either of those. For example a company you worked for might publish a photo of you without asking you etc. What’s more interesting is how inaccurate a lot of this data is. Spokeo for example seems to think I am related to someone because they share a last name and we lived in the same apartment building at some point. Google’s approach of simply collecting third party information simply isn’t reliable.
    • ehsankia 5y ago
      So should Google be the moderator of the entire WWW and resolve every single dispute on any websites posting information about someone who doesn't want their information there? Or should no one ever have their website searchable because a small handful of websites post content which 100% of the people in the content don't agree with? And what if I post about someone who assaulted me, and the criminal wants my content off my website? These are not easy problems and "let's throw it all out" doesn't seem like a solution.
      • Retric 5y ago
        Publishing accurate information is already difficult and their trying to automated it. Having Google post your information is concerning, having them potentially confuse the victim with the perpetrators is a whole other issue. Which isn’t a problem for Google because their standards seem to be good enough to target advertising, but it is a problem for everyone else.
• extropy 5y ago
  Another angle: there is a huge non-public industry of cataloging all the public and not so public information. Available to whoever is ready to pay. Public indexes is just the surface of the iceberg. And regulating them down would just be more profit for the pay-to-play.
• dheera 5y ago
  Also why is this restricted to only under 18? Why can't over-18's also remove personal information?
• hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  > What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously? This would require a cultural shift away from gossip. But humans love gossip. If you can't stop gossip, you can't stop someone from saying things they learned about another person, and by extension you can't stop it from being automated neither.
  • thomastjeffery 5y ago
    It would still be less relentless if common individual behavior was to keep personal information private instead of posting everything about yourself on social media.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• smoe 5y ago
  I think by now the problem is more cultural than technical or juridical. I mean many countries have laws in place that would allow for picture removal. I'm really glad, that my teenage years where before social media and everyone walking around with internet connected cameras on them all the time. All the stupid and embarrassing things I did only live in the memories of the people I was with and it is fun to talk about every now and then. But when going out these days, there is an almost constant "peer-surveilance" with everyone taking pictures and videos and immediately sharing them online without reflecting whether it is a good idea and just assuming consent of the others. Then when asking people to remove it, the request is often met with bewilderment or mockery why you'd want that. And sure, I could legally go after the person, but that is not really something you'd want to do within a (extended) circle of friends. I think there are a lot of very cool things that can be done these days that weren't possible in my time. But the complete disrespect of others peoples privacy and their image is really scary to me.
• jollybean 5y ago
  My original take on Google when it another search engines were starting is that it should be illegal for them to scrape businesses without 1) explicit permission and licensing, and that 2) doing so across borders should be governed by treaty. 1 would be easily taken care of because businesses want their stuff indexed, but 2 would be quite something i.e. the ascent of privacy laws. I'd also like to see this 'tool' made available to anyone. I'm not sure if random photos of people are 'in the public interest', or beyond that if we really get some kind of transcendent value out of all that 'data'. My bet is that most of the power we get from 'sharing' has to do with explicit knowledge i.e. news, research, data APIs etc.
• mc32 5y ago
  I used to think it was very weird for job applicants in Germany to have to attach a passport-like photo of themselves to their CVs/Resumes… And then! People gladly populate their linked-in and other social media not only with their likenesses but voluntarily offer their opinions attached to such images and real life personae! So…
• lettergram 5y ago
  I have done everything in my power to keep my kids off the internet. I tell family members not to take photos, I don’t send them through email, I won’t take photos with phones that are cloud connected, etc etc. The reality is, I walk in and still see a grandma who doesn’t respect the wishes of my wife and I and are adding filters to my kids faces. Now Instagram has their photos. No consent given. I don’t think she posted, but clearly her phone gave Instagram access. Imo we need laws forbidding image indexing or collection of images. We also need some serious protections around data. The reality is Google, Microsoft, Apple, Chinese communist party, zoom, etc all have too much data and own everyone. Literally, I can’t imagine the government taking any action at all because of their influence. So I think we are done, frankly.
• gnopgnip 5y ago
  What does it mean specifically if we "stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously", making it illegal to catalogue all of this information? Imposing a tax? Requiring permission of those involved?
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  The situation in the US is much better than it could be. Yandex has an index of people's faces. You can search pictures by face. And China... you know. It is a surveillance nightmare.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  Any child of the Cold War thinks of the "Stasi" as an organization dedicated to cataloging every bit of information about everyone and using it to harm any detractors of the State. Do the same thing and make it publicly available for anyone to harm anyone whatsoever, and you have Google.
• nitwit005 5y ago
  > What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously? It wouldn't eliminate this problem, assuming you consider it a problem. A lot of the images floating around aren't tied to a name. Anyone can save a file and re-use it in some other context.