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I wouldn't say it's the most pressing privacy issue, but we can collectively focus on more than just a single priority. For instance, I wouldn't call someone's

by macksd 5y ago

I wouldn't say it's the most pressing privacy issue, but we can collectively focus on more than just a single priority. For instance, I wouldn't call someone's medical career useless just because they weren't working on reducing heart disease. For a long time the first Google result for me was someone from my school posting about work I did. I didn't find their comments particularly complimentary. I wasn't wild about the idea that someone at a prospective employer would probably Google me and see that. I didn't like the idea of harassing the site owner into taking it down, but I will say a big motivator for me in open-source has been flooding the Internet with better reflections of myself to drown out stuff like that. Stuff ends up on the Internet without people's knowledge or express consent all the time. When I joined LinkedIn they already knew a bunch of people I could be connected to. I never gave them that info about my relationships. Other people did! First thing I got was a suggestion to connect with my ex-girlfriend. I hardly think I'm an anomaly with stuff like this. edit: As another datapoint, I have a coworker who is fanatical about privacy. Will refuse to stand in group photos. Will ask you to delete photos they may appear in if they see you taking one. Gives random names on restaurant orders. No LinkedIn, no social media. I Googled their name: tons of accurate photos, an accurate phone number, school history, etc.

ehsankia 5y ago
This is missing the point though. Let's focus on #1 from above; most people who post things online probably want Google to index them and even do SEO tricks to get there. I post stuff about myself on my website because I want people to see it. The issue comes when I put stuff on my website about someone else, as in your example. I want my content to be on Google, but you want my content off of Google. At that point, there's a conflict and it's not clear to me who should be resolving it and what position Google should take. The options are: 1. No one gets to be indexed, which will hurt the millions who want people to discover their content 2. Google has to manually decide in every single instance like the one you mention in your post, that seems unrealistic 3. The status quo, which is that Google indexes what's posted publicly.
- macksd 5y ago
  Or a 4th option: if, as you say, most people are doing SEO tricks to get there, why not just only index stuff that has indexing-specific metadata associated with it. I don't see why this needs to be so different from an opt-in version of robots.txt. IMO this only becomes unclear when you're collecting user content en masse from non-technical users, say in a case like Facebook, etc. And IMO Facebook just shouldn't be passing on user-content from individual consumers to be indexed, especially if they encourage you to upload data that references other people.
  - ehsankia 5y ago
    That doesn't solve the majority of issues brought up here. Just like it wouldn't solve all the things you mentioned about your colleague posting things you aren't happy about.

by macksd 5y ago

ehsankia 5y ago

This is missing the point though. Let's focus on #1 from above; most people who post things online probably want Google to index them and even do SEO tricks to get there. I post stuff about myself on my website because I want people to see it. The issue comes when I put stuff on my website about someone else, as in your example. I want my content to be on Google, but you want my content off of Google. At that point, there's a conflict and it's not clear to me who should be resolving it and what position Google should take. The options are: 1. No one gets to be indexed, which will hurt the millions who want people to discover their content 2. Google has to manually decide in every single instance like the one you mention in your post, that seems unrealistic 3. The status quo, which is that Google indexes what's posted publicly.

macksd 5y ago
Or a 4th option: if, as you say, most people are doing SEO tricks to get there, why not just only index stuff that has indexing-specific metadata associated with it. I don't see why this needs to be so different from an opt-in version of robots.txt. IMO this only becomes unclear when you're collecting user content en masse from non-technical users, say in a case like Facebook, etc. And IMO Facebook just shouldn't be passing on user-content from individual consumers to be indexed, especially if they encourage you to upload data that references other people.
- ehsankia 5y ago
  That doesn't solve the majority of issues brought up here. Just like it wouldn't solve all the things you mentioned about your colleague posting things you aren't happy about.