5 ms·

> A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page Not for me. It took until page 3 for just my first name to appear. If somebody is l

> A Google search for "BoppreH" turned up several results on the first page Not for me. It took until page 3 for just my first name to appear. If somebody is looking at past Github commits, that's already a high enough barrier for me. I only partially agree with your conclusion. Asking people to maintain total anonymity always, with any slips punishable by permanent publication of that PII, might be the current status quo, but is not where we as society want to head.

unreal37 4y ago
I see your name in like the sixth Google result on page 1. You can't "put the genie back in the bottle". It's out there, the Internet remembers forever.
jmillikin 4y ago
> Asking people to maintain total anonymity always, with any > slips punishable by permanent publication of that PII, might > be the current status quo, but is not where we as society > want to head. ‘Sea,’ cried Canute, ‘I command you to come no farther! Waves, stop your rolling, and do not dare to touch my feet!’
- BoppreH 4y ago
  The Google results are almost entirely from places that I control, directly or indirectly. I can delete the repos, retract my papers, ask moderators to remove my comments. For more serious cases there are courts and laws. There's no reason why language models should be immune from what is standard expected behavior in society. I'm not raging against the sea, I'm raging against a bulldozer operator who has plugged their ears.
  - dahart 4y ago
    Why should AI have different privacy standards than google? The papers you referred too in the top comment have been talking about the ability for AI to infer PII from anonymous data. But that’s not what happened here. You are complaining about AI returning non-anonymous data with easily findable results via other mechanisms. I’m not sure I understand why AI should be expected to understand and filter out information that is otherwise public?
  - bragr 4y ago
    >There's no reason why language models should be immune from what is standard expected behavior in society. So sue OpenAI then. That's your recourse if you believe you've been harmed. I don't think you'll be very successful, given that even people here aren't strongly on your side. I think normies on a jury trial are going to be even less sympathetic to your arguments than the HN crowd.
- darkwater 4y ago
  Well, if the sea was only made by humans and governed by human laws... Or for you the Internet is an uncontrollable force of nature?
  - randallsquared 4y ago
    The aggregate of human action is uncontrollable, at least at our current understanding and level of technology. What is being asked to be controlled, here, is other humans, not connectivity and protocols, and controlling humans can be... difficult, whether by law, cultural norms, or whatnot.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Yep, no way to do anything about the sea. Just ask the Netherlands.
dahart 4y ago
It seems strange to expect the internet to keep your privacy for you, if your PII has been leaked by you. Nobody else but you can know what you want done with your information, and people choose to post PII routinely, so it’s not possible to assume that when someone posts PII it’s actually private or an error. GPT-3 cannot be blamed for reciting things you can find in a Google search, and it doesn’t matter if the results are on page 1 or page 20. These days there usually are ways to fix leaky posts, if it is taken care of immediately, but not if you wait a few years. Either way, this doesn’t feel like clear enough thinking about what should and should not happen, nor about what society wants. I want control of my privacy, and if the internet were to scrub PII without my authorization, which seems like what you’re suggesting, that would not be control.
iso1631 4y ago
The third result down is a repo which I assume is yours. Until 4 hours ago your name was in the LICENSE.TXT, and it's still the most recent change. You've also got your CV indexed on boppreh.com (and available in archive.org) Another early result in DDG is a profile on deviantart, which you may not want linked to your professional identity (or maybe you do). Your steam community page has a list of hundreds of games you own. Fundamentally your problem isn't as much that your github account links to your name, it's that you use the same identifier across the web, one that isn't common like "neo", from "interesting" sites like deviantart to more normal ones like ubuntuforums. You've removed your CV from your website, but it's still in internet archive. And do you really want your CV hidden? You've gota a good portfolio of work on the internet. To me, the lack of separation of your names is far more of a challenge to your anonymity - especially when you call it out by posting something like this under that nome-de-plume. You have multiple aspects of your life that you can present in different ways, choosing a single unique nickname links those together, is that what you really want - even if your real name wasn't connected to it?
- BoppreH 4y ago
  Thanks for the list, I took some actions based on it. Again, I'm not too concerned about my name or what comes up on Google or GitHub because they follow GDPR. Language Models are already as powerful as google searches in finding my name, but there's not recourse. What will this look like in 5, 10, 50 years?
  - iso1631 4y ago
    I think you're putting too much faith in GDPR and right to be forgotten. I'm guessing you've got Portuguese citizen from a parent to be covered (not aware of any Brazillian rights), but I'm not sure how much that applies to fake names like "BoppreH" or "Elton John" compared to a real person.
  - dahart 4y ago
    Why does GDPR help? Have you read it? It has no provision for protecting you from information you choose to share publicly. GDPR will not force Google to scrub the information you chose to put online, that’s not the spirit of the right to be forgotten idea. GDPR does not enforce absolute privacy at all times, it merely sets reasonable standards for companies to prevent leaking your information without your consent; it’s specifically for when you didn’t choose to publish your PII. Your problem is that you gave consent and chose to publish your PII and now want it revoked globally long after the fact. That is extremely problematic since it’s very very difficult to unpublish things once published, and there is little if any precedent for people being able to change their mind. Nobody expects to be able to unpublish a book such that it cannot be recovered or reprinted after copyrights expire, that’s just not a thing, right? This isn’t a problem with language models, this seems like more of a problem with exposing yourself and then changing your mind. It would be great if there were tools to help manage this, but that’s not something that has ever existed nor is codified by GDPR or any other current laws. That said, your concept does present an opportunity for an idea that someone could implement and start a business or organization for.

unreal37 4y ago

I see your name in like the sixth Google result on page 1. You can't "put the genie back in the bottle". It's out there, the Internet remembers forever.

jmillikin 4y ago

> Asking people to maintain total anonymity always, with any > slips punishable by permanent publication of that PII, might > be the current status quo, but is not where we as society > want to head. ‘Sea,’ cried Canute, ‘I command you to come no farther! Waves, stop your rolling, and do not dare to touch my feet!’

BoppreH 4y ago
The Google results are almost entirely from places that I control, directly or indirectly. I can delete the repos, retract my papers, ask moderators to remove my comments. For more serious cases there are courts and laws. There's no reason why language models should be immune from what is standard expected behavior in society. I'm not raging against the sea, I'm raging against a bulldozer operator who has plugged their ears.
- dahart 4y ago
  Why should AI have different privacy standards than google? The papers you referred too in the top comment have been talking about the ability for AI to infer PII from anonymous data. But that’s not what happened here. You are complaining about AI returning non-anonymous data with easily findable results via other mechanisms. I’m not sure I understand why AI should be expected to understand and filter out information that is otherwise public?
- bragr 4y ago
  >There's no reason why language models should be immune from what is standard expected behavior in society. So sue OpenAI then. That's your recourse if you believe you've been harmed. I don't think you'll be very successful, given that even people here aren't strongly on your side. I think normies on a jury trial are going to be even less sympathetic to your arguments than the HN crowd.
darkwater 4y ago
Well, if the sea was only made by humans and governed by human laws... Or for you the Internet is an uncontrollable force of nature?
- randallsquared 4y ago
  The aggregate of human action is uncontrollable, at least at our current understanding and level of technology. What is being asked to be controlled, here, is other humans, not connectivity and protocols, and controlling humans can be... difficult, whether by law, cultural norms, or whatnot.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Yep, no way to do anything about the sea. Just ask the Netherlands.

dahart 4y ago

It seems strange to expect the internet to keep your privacy for you, if your PII has been leaked by you. Nobody else but you can know what you want done with your information, and people choose to post PII routinely, so it’s not possible to assume that when someone posts PII it’s actually private or an error. GPT-3 cannot be blamed for reciting things you can find in a Google search, and it doesn’t matter if the results are on page 1 or page 20. These days there usually are ways to fix leaky posts, if it is taken care of immediately, but not if you wait a few years. Either way, this doesn’t feel like clear enough thinking about what should and should not happen, nor about what society wants. I want control of my privacy, and if the internet were to scrub PII without my authorization, which seems like what you’re suggesting, that would not be control.

iso1631 4y ago

The third result down is a repo which I assume is yours. Until 4 hours ago your name was in the LICENSE.TXT, and it's still the most recent change. You've also got your CV indexed on boppreh.com (and available in archive.org) Another early result in DDG is a profile on deviantart, which you may not want linked to your professional identity (or maybe you do). Your steam community page has a list of hundreds of games you own. Fundamentally your problem isn't as much that your github account links to your name, it's that you use the same identifier across the web, one that isn't common like "neo", from "interesting" sites like deviantart to more normal ones like ubuntuforums. You've removed your CV from your website, but it's still in internet archive. And do you really want your CV hidden? You've gota a good portfolio of work on the internet. To me, the lack of separation of your names is far more of a challenge to your anonymity - especially when you call it out by posting something like this under that nome-de-plume. You have multiple aspects of your life that you can present in different ways, choosing a single unique nickname links those together, is that what you really want - even if your real name wasn't connected to it?

BoppreH 4y ago
Thanks for the list, I took some actions based on it. Again, I'm not too concerned about my name or what comes up on Google or GitHub because they follow GDPR. Language Models are already as powerful as google searches in finding my name, but there's not recourse. What will this look like in 5, 10, 50 years?
- iso1631 4y ago
  I think you're putting too much faith in GDPR and right to be forgotten. I'm guessing you've got Portuguese citizen from a parent to be covered (not aware of any Brazillian rights), but I'm not sure how much that applies to fake names like "BoppreH" or "Elton John" compared to a real person.
- dahart 4y ago
  Why does GDPR help? Have you read it? It has no provision for protecting you from information you choose to share publicly. GDPR will not force Google to scrub the information you chose to put online, that’s not the spirit of the right to be forgotten idea. GDPR does not enforce absolute privacy at all times, it merely sets reasonable standards for companies to prevent leaking your information without your consent; it’s specifically for when you didn’t choose to publish your PII. Your problem is that you gave consent and chose to publish your PII and now want it revoked globally long after the fact. That is extremely problematic since it’s very very difficult to unpublish things once published, and there is little if any precedent for people being able to change their mind. Nobody expects to be able to unpublish a book such that it cannot be recovered or reprinted after copyrights expire, that’s just not a thing, right? This isn’t a problem with language models, this seems like more of a problem with exposing yourself and then changing your mind. It would be great if there were tools to help manage this, but that’s not something that has ever existed nor is codified by GDPR or any other current laws. That said, your concept does present an opportunity for an idea that someone could implement and start a business or organization for.