Couldn't fit the whole tweet, so just to be clear, she's talking about manual, non-legal requests:
> One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?...
Down the thread, she adds this:
> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack.
I didn't know about this service URL, and had just assumed "reputation managers", if they did anything at all, were limited to SEO spamming.
edit: Searched HN for mention of this link and found exactly 5 results, 3 of which look unique, and the earliest in Dec. 23, 2015:
> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack.
While that sounds like a high price, and you usually don't want to just hire the first person you see advertise a service, the concept of specialization there, and some people just not wanting to devote the time to becoming experts everywhere, seems perfectly fine and normal.
People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
I'm pretty good with electrical diagrams and such, and I know exactly what one needs to do to stay about as safe as one can. I've fished (ethernet) wires before. I still hire electricians, because it's the only practical way to buy electrician's insurance for a project.
I know a retired electrician. He hires electricians for anything nontrivial, for the insurance.
That said your broader point has a lot of merit. I hire plumbers for anything more complicated than snaking a drain, and it's because of their specialty knowledge.
Here in NZ, a lot of work on your own property is legal - even some relatively complicated stuff - but the catch is that you need to find a qualified inspector to sign off on it.
The reality is that unless someone knows you and your work personally (friend, relative, w/e) it can be really difficult to find an inspector who is willing to sign off on some random persons work as there is a liability component (nowhere near as large as there is in the US, we have publicly funded "accident insurance" called ACC) in doing so.
That being said, anything I can legally do myself I do and I am sure to maintain good relationships with the inspectors I know.
What "freedoms"? That term is used everywhere and rarely defined well. The freedom to "do what you want with your own property"? That doesn't exist - anywhere! You need to follow the rules and the only way to make sure someone is doing things properly (or at least know how to) is either to have them be certified in what they do or have someone who is certified check their work.
If you screw up your electrical wiring, your house can catch fire. If a house is on fire, the neighboring houses are rather likely to also catch fire. Once you have a handful of houses on fire, all bets are off - the entire neighbourhood might burn. Still think you should have that "freedom"?
>That doesn't exist - anywhere! You need to follow the rules and the only way to make sure someone is doing things properly (or at least know how to) is either to have them be certified in what they do or have someone who is certified check their work.
Dude, trust me.
Yes there are building and electrical codes. Many are written in blood. The perception that there is no implicit freedom to be found anywhere is unique to our internet worked world where you can pull the tail of the invisible cat and have it yowl at the inspector in short order.
What you are probably struggling with, is the concept of the Social Contract's primacy. There are those that believe what is allowed starts with a yes/no from the biggest baddest enforcer of their idea of the Social Contract. I call these folks Hobbesian. Then there are those who see the Social Contract itself as something subject to the independent acceptance in whole or in part by independent, free-thinking agents. I call these folks Locke-ian. They are famous for the intellectual fireworks that get set off if you lock them in a room together to settle their differences.
The reality is, the truth is something more akin to: let's implement paperwork and objective inspections so people have a safe recourse, but leave the door open for people to do what they want with things they own, and only argue about the more philosophical notes when there is a clear and present breach of decorum by one party or another.
This arrangement tends to keep both parties reasonably happy.
I honestly have no clue what you're on about. There's nothing philosophical about this discussion - it's entirely practical. We don't want to get hurt by other people's mistakes, therefore we don't let people do things where that is a possibility without training or supervision by someone who is trained. You do not have the freedom to do XYZ when society has decided that if you attempt to do XYZ, measures should be taken to stop and/or punish you. The fact that you have the ability to do XYZ and that the authorities we have delegated to ensure you don't do XYZ are doing their job well is entirely besides the point.
People don't want to get hit by a car, so we've collectively agreed to require that all drivers pass an exam that proves they know how to drive safely enough to bring the risk of them running someone over with a car to an acceptable level. The general freedom to drive a car does not exist - we've collectively limited it to only those individuals, who pass our standard.
Similarly, everyone does not have the right to build their own airplanes and fly people around in them, because those people could get seriously hurt - we have limited that "freedom" to only people who have proven that they know enough about how to build and/or fly planes to, again, decrease that risk down to an acceptable level.
Do home-owner repaired house catch on fire more often than houses repaired by licensed contractors?
My insurance company has never told me I can't repair my own house.
Easy to say things like this, but once you get out into the real world you notice a lot of America doesn't want to pay $150/hour to change a light switch...and has the knowledge to DIY it.
Back what up? I never made any claims about whether DIY is more dangerous or not. But the fact is that DIY or not, certain regulations must be followed when doing repairs - this is written into law in most countries. You're not allowed, for example, to hook up an oven to a 30A breaker using speaker wire. Because we can't trust that everyone will know not to do that, certifications have been designed to ensure correct knowledge and skill and those certifications are often mandated by law. You have two options - either get certified, so you can be trusted to carry out the work yourself, or get someone who is certified to at least look it over. Seems entirely reasonable.
> You have two options - either get certified, so you can be trusted to carry out the work yourself, or get someone who is certified to at least look it over. Seems entirely reasonable.
That it seems entirely reasonable is most of the problem.
Because people imagine that getting certified is a two week safety course, and that getting inspected is paying someone $10 to spend ten minutes looking over your five minute job.
But then the licensed professionals capture the regulators and the licensing requirement stops being about safety and starts being about gatekeeping, so getting licensed becomes impractical for anyone not full-time gainfully employed in that industry. And the gatekeeping and bureaucracy cause the inspection to require weeks to get an appointment and the payment of $150 over the replacement of a $10 light switch.
Then, you notice that the light in your living room flickers sometimes. You would be inclined to have your buddy the electrical engineer come have a look except that he's not a licensed electrician and you're not convinced that the lights flickering once in a while is a problem whose solution is worth $150. Two months later the light switch with the bad connection finally overheats and your house burns down. Or you're willing to pay the money but it takes 15 days to get an appointment and the amount of time you had before the problem became a fire was two weeks.
Making repairs to safety-critical things less accessible is dangerous.
Great point. My brother and I tried to get some type of electricians license in order to do our DIY work more "professionally".
I took household lighting classes at the local community college and our union electrician uncle helped use redo his house.
Impossible in my state to get a electrician license without doing 1+ years as an apprentice under a electrical company full-time. Once you get the "apprentice" license, you then spend another year or two under more supervision to become a journeyman.
At that point you are able to pull permits and work on your own. So 3-5 years working as a full time electrician. They expect you to learn everything on the job and eventually take a test.
More time to get an electrician license than to become a licensed police officer (250 hours of academy training).
Sweet. All of that to legally change a dishwasher in my house.
So all of the people on this forum spouting off about "certified electricians" are either part of the electrician racket themselves or have 0 actual clue what they are talking about.
The prior owner of my house was very free with his exposed wire nuts and other sketchy wiring practices then. I’ll take some level of safety that my house won’t burn down or electrocute me over absolute freedom.
You should have a house inspected before you buy it. It's not necessary to monitor and restrict all owners to protect possible future buyers who don't want to inspect a house before buying it.
It was inspected and specifically called out by the inspector in the visible areas, but there’s no way to know the full scope of the issues unless the inspector were to rip open walls and stuff.
Either way we got a good deal on the house and I’ve been learning a lot about how to fix it the right way.
There were some splices from the 60’s that were completely inaccessible in a sealed attic that weren’t in junction boxes.
There were also some hot wires just dangling out of a box in the basement, and a couple fried plugs, so I and I assume the inspector knew that there were bound to be more fun surprises.
It’s not like the inspector is going to say “well we better open up this wall just in case”
Ended up rewiring one of the bathrooms after what started out as “change a couple of switches and add a GFCI”
You can do anything you want on your own property, but if said property burns down because of incorrect electrical work you did yourself, you might not get money from your insurance...
Where is this notion of "you can do anything on your property" coming from? A similar one is also "it's my car, I'll do what I want with it", etc. But all modification to both your house anr your car have a big possibility of puttinf others in danger. If you mod your car in a dangerous way or screw up your house electrical wiring, other unrelated people may get hurt - you don't have the right to do that!
Physics allows it? This in the same way one can commit crimes or at least that's how I read it. Clearly one can not do the things physics doesn't allow.
As you point out there are likely punitive consequences but those are after the fact.
Or they are just needed to ensure you are not accidentally making a future giant « why would I need a fuse here ? » barbecue that you may possibly sell to another person.
TBH the electricians I know tend to rely on their know-how to just do things right rather than on somebody else with the ability to sure in case it all burns down.
I do have a so called "DIY insurance" on my home policy - if I damage something while doing a DIY project(drill into a cable or a pipe for instance) my home insurance will cover the repair. Is that not enough?
No, that's just for incidental damage and probably legally mandated by your state. If your house burns down to due to DIY wiring, the insurance company won't pay out a dime (if the inspectors discover it).
Electricians have liability insurance provided by an organization specializing in policies for practicing tradesmen. If an insurance company fails to disqualify a homeowner's policy and pays out, it will then go after the electrician and his insurance to recoup their losses. Residential electrical fires are extremely preventable so insurance companies almost universally refuse to insure homes with DIY electrical work because the homeowner is the one liable.
This idea that DIY wiring can invalidate your insurance policy is widely repeated, but I don't think it's true.
Homeowner's insurance routinely covers preventable disasters. Did you leave a candle on or a heater plugged in and start a fire? Did you not cut down a tree that was looking unhealthy and it fell on your home? These are all situations where your insurance would pay a claim. The cases where they would not pay a claim are more along the lines of "deliberate arson".
You may well need to certify that work is permitted in order to get an insurance policy.
There is just no way this is correct. First, most municipalities in America anyway allow a homeowner to do their own electrical work. You are required to get a permit for the work though and then have it inspected by the city inspector to verify the work was done correctly. But second and maybe more importantly how would you ever be able to get insurance on an older house. There may have been dozens of different electricians and homeowners that did work over the years. Who would the insurance company go after if a problem occurred.
> First, most municipalities in America anyway allow a homeowner to do their own electrical work. You are required to get a permit for the work though and then have it inspected by the city inspector to verify the work was done correctly
They allow them to change sockets and light switches. Anything requiring a city inspector is literally the same thing as getting a licensed electrician. Municipalities have a lot more insurance than an electrician does, often unwritten by the same reinsurers as the electricians.
> But second and maybe more importantly how would you ever be able to get insurance on an older house. There may have been dozens of different electricians and homeowners that did work over the years. Who would the insurance company go after if a problem occurred.
The insurance company goes bankrupt and the state bails out the homeowner. That's why we have electrical contractor surety bonds.
I've read over my home-owners insurance policy very well. There are no provisions that say anything about "electrical work requiring a city permit shall be done by a licensed electrician".
Do you have any evidence to point to where someone changes a dishwasher or some other small electrical project, and later insurance denies a claim?
I can imagine scenarios of gross negligence (wires run all over exposed, gas leaks, etc. etc.), but if we are talking small mistakes by homeowner during a un-permitted DIY project, I have a very very hard time believing insurance is going to scour the rubble to investigate...like literally how to you prove that!?
I am curious about this as well. Is swapping out light switches and outlets something to be concerned about or is it the more major stuff like running wires, adding breakers, etc?
Hmmmm I'm not so sure. I'm in the UK not in the states, so the laws are different I'm sure, but in UK you only need a licenced electrician when adding/removing an electrical circuit and for any electrical work in the bathrooms. So say adding a new spur from your fuse box to add electricity to your garage or a garden shed - that sort of thing. Any work on existing circuits(adding sockets, light switches, new light mounts etc) is fair play and doesn't require a permission or any paperwork. Instead you just get an electrical inspection done and an electrician signs off on the house as a whole.
Like someone else said - when you buy a house you don't know how the electrical wiring was done and by whom. Paperwork is required only for the things I mentioned above - new circuits added after the house was built mostly. And even then someone would need to prove that it was done after construction.
So even if the insurance company wanted to deny a claim due to a DIY fitted socket....I think they would struggle, as there's absolutely nothing forbidding me from installing one, and most importantly - my contract with the insurance company doesn't forbid me from doing so.
I would say that the difference between your example and these reputation managers is that they are often themselves directly responsible for the problems they create:
Yep, the reason they are so effective is because they own the very website that is spreading the slander. So you're really just indirectly paying the website who's blackmailing you to remove the blackmail.
> People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
The ultimate reason people pay electricians is liability. Unlicensed work is an easy way to invalidate your homeowner's insurance, lose everything, and get sued for any damage to your neighbors' property (by their insurance company, no less).
My view is that if the only reason you are doing something is because of the insurance implications, then you've surely made the wrong decision.
Nobody's interests are less aligned with your own than an insurance company's. There are lots of legitimate reasons to hire an electrician, but making decisions solely based on what someone who wants you to perpetually give them money whole finding reasons to never give it back is never good practice.
Nobody's interests are less aligned with your own than an insurance company's when it comes time to pay out.
Investigating a case is expensive, let alone litigating one against someone with their life's assets on the line, so it's in their best interest to prevent the event they're insuring against from occurring. They have the most accurate up to date data on real world outcomes so especially in professional circumstances, it usually pays to follow their advice.
> Then again, electrical work can be life threatening, so the potential damage is rather high.
As a DIYer, I was shocked to find what the previously hired professional electrician left for me: a secondary panel for the whole structure that controls exactly one outlet. The sub panel was apparently not fed from the main panel, but rather from a panel in a different building, so simply switching the main breaker of the breaker panel to off did not turn off that one specific outlet, you know the one I was trying to replace. Why that one outlet (GCFI in the bathroom) required it’s own sub panel was not clear at all but my left hand was numb for a few hours. Thankfully it didn’t go further than that (maybe a few copies of me in the multiverse died but not this one).
The GFCI didn’t go off so I don’t think I touched the ground wire. I wasn’t myself grounded but I grabbed the outlet as I pulled by grasping the sides and my hand completed the circuit between the live and neutral wires. I am generally really careful about this kind of stuff but this was a complete surprise with the wiring of the place.
Honestly it didn’t actually do much beyond just small muscle twitches in my hand. I only realized what happened after I let go of it and my hand still felt a little funny. Definitely do not recommend but at least it was a 240V outlet or anything like that.
Wouldn't plugging in a small appliance (electrical toothbrush, phone charger, alarm clock, etc) be enough to tell you if a socket is live? Why have an extra device unless you need to do actual tests (ie, check what the voltage/current draw is)? Plug in something with a power indicator before shutting off the power, and check it before you start working.
The metal inside the socket that completes the circuit with the male pins can age and get bent, losing contact unless the plug is at just the right angle or the pins are bent in the right direction. It's unreliable and unsafe. If its your house and you're intimately familiar with the state of the sockets, it's slightly less unreliable and unsafe.
The EM coming off AC mains makes a non contact detector hard to fool and it's such a simple device that even cheap knockoffs are reliable.
I generally agree with you, but electric work is different. Except if you’ve wired your whole house by yourself, having someone qualified and legally responsible for rewiring is important. Even if their own work is minimal, they also take responsibility for not fixing the previous work if there was anything that should have been noticed, and it’s a role you can’t take.
On insurance, as you say their interests are opposite, and you need to be defensive about how to deal with them. Not having insurance on a house is not an option, so making sure you have a standing ground when shit hits the fan is pretty reasonable in my opinion.
All parties related to a home (owner, occupier, bank, insurer) have an interest in the asset they have a stake in.
Home electric is one of those things that many people claim to know and understand. The reality is that most people are clueless, and can and do make mistakes. If you ever bought an old house, you get this — there’s always some dangerous cob job hiding somewhere.
The evil insurance company doesn’t want to pay when you are seriously injured in a fire. You probably don’t want to get injured. In the end, interests are aligned.
> My view is that if the only reason you are doing something is because of the insurance implications, then you've surely made the wrong decision.
In this situation, I am paying someone else to assume risk for me. That is, I suppose, a type of insurance, in a very broad sense.
However, I am not in any way relying on my interests and the other person's to be aligned, except in the sense of performing the work they are legally contracted to perform. All I am doing is asking this person to assume some risk for me, in exchange for which I provide them a fee.
Short of "take on all the risk yourself", which, even if perhaps desirable (I'm not sure …), is often not feasible, what is a better approach here?
I see those as separate. Paying someone to take on risk I see a clear argument for.
Its specifically the "do it this way because insurance wont cover you otherwise" that I'm reacting too, because I think that had caused a lot of damage to society. Effectively nobody is taking on risk under the model insurance companies push - insurance won't let you do anything risky, and won't pay if you do. That's why I say it's a losing proposition to have your behavior dictated by an insurer. (Probably a prisoner's dilemma really, because inevitably some group gives in, then makes to worse for everyone)
This is a good point, and also a general fact of life I think. Society is not just modeled by laws, but also by influencial groups.
If your company gets banned by visa/mastercard for dealing with porn, you’ll steer away for anything porn related.
You know banks won’t give you a loan for growing legal weed, if your goal is actually to make money you’ll grow other fancy aromatic plants instead, etc.
You still can push through, but getting nudged is not new, will never stop, and most of the time reflects your societies values anyway.
That's a good, concise description. My particular beef with this happening with respect to insurance is that it "nudges" us to all be risk averse and boring, and artificially prioritize safety over all kinds of other outcomes.
You are right on the distortion. Even safety can be kind of out of the wibdow with people taking their insurance's approval as a GO sign for otherwise detrimental behaviors, like building houses in submersible areas.
> insurance won't let you do anything risky, and won't pay if you do.
This is the part that is outright fraud. A legitimate insurance policy is literally a cheque; if something happens, you deposit it in the bank and get you money, and it's the insurance company's responsibility to prove that your claim is not covered by the policy written on the cheque. The insurance company does not make a decision about whether to pay.
Without trying to sound snarky, I feel like maybe you haven't had to deal with insurance companies for anything substantial. A lot of them go out of their way to say no to as much as they can, and you need to fight with them to get them to change their decision.
> A lot of them go out of their way to say no to as much as they can, and you need to fight with them to get them to change their decision.
I am aware of that; I'm pointing out that their being able to say no (rather than the cheque being valid by default and claim being paid out without the insurer's involvement, and the insurance company having to go to court to recover the money after the fact) is fraud, precisely because it enables them to "say no to as much as they can".
I have never had an insurance company flat out deny a claim. The only back and forth i generally have is on how much as they try to pay as little as is allowed.
> People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
Not really.
People pay electricians for their experience and knowledge that give them the tools to solve complex problems, simply, without messing up your wiring, causing a fire, or blowing something up.
Removing a link on Google, on the other hand, involves clicking on a link and filling out a form. You don't need state licensing or problem solving abilities to fill out that form. Any "reputation managers" out there that are doing this are essentially defrauding people, and it's shameful.
Let's say someone wants to replace a lightswitch. Google/Youtube will show you how to do that safely in a matter of minutes.
People pay because they're afraid of at least one of (a) their ability to be sure they're getting the right instructions, or (b) their ability to execute. In the electrician example, (b) could be substantial if you don't understand electricity. "Electricity can kill you" is basically the home-maintenance version of "the internet is confusing" that would prevent someone from wanting to find this Google form themselves.
In the "reputation manager" example, (a) is going to come into play more, I bet. A good "reputation manager" probably isn't going to just fill out one form on google, I imagine there's a lot you could do to cover Bing, wikipedia, and various other sites and services. I don't know where employees go to get background checks, for instance, but maybe I need to have that covered, too. So now the problem still parallels working with an electrician - how do you know if you found a good one? Lots of handyman/contractor horror stories and scams out there too!
I paid a gas plumber full rates to in effect remind me where the tap is for the fill line for my boiler.
Over time a boiler that isn't meaningfully "leaking" will still gradually lose internal pressure. Once the pressure inside the boiler is less than outside the boiler even when the water inside is hotter, that's not good. Eventually the system won't work and shuts down for safety, but before that it'll make a lot of noise while running. There's a pressure meter so you can see what's wrong if you don't understand boilers. My meter said about 0.4 bar. So that's too low, now I just needed to re-pressurize it.
The regulations here say that, to avoid mistakes resulting in stagnant water flowing back from a boiler tank into the fresh water system, the two mustn't be permanently connected. So there'd logically be an input, you connect a temporary hose, re-pressurize.
In practice, nobody does that, the installers will run a permanent line, in defiance of the rules, and use a tap, now you can re-pressurize by turning the tap.
Except, many years after moving in and setting up I'd forgotten where that tap could be. It wasn't where I expected to find it, and I could not think there else they'd have put it. So after sleeping on it and still not remembering I called a plumber. Not an emergency plumber, but still plumbers aren't cheap.
The plumber also couldn't immediately find it, it wasn't where he first looked either. But I can't actually tell how much time he spent "pretending" to look versus how long it really took him to discover it. Because it's embarrassing right? Even if the customer is up-front about the nature of the task, "It's under the kitchen sink - behind this panel, here" (yes, that's where it actually is) doesn't feel like a real job worth £80 or whatever it was.
Professional hide-and-go-seek is a painful reality. The lost server, lost VM, lost power outlet, lost cable drop etc. It’s usually funny in hindsight but painful at the time.
Huh, never heard of a manual one of those. I have some little widget that automatically refills the boiler when there's a pressure difference in the wrong direction I guess.
Yes, the modern solution to this consists of a pressure-reducing valve (refills when pressure in the boiler system drops) and a backflow preventer (for the safety issue).
I assume the point was that anything negative about you ends up on Google it can lead to mental issues and in a worst case scenario you might take your life so its better you hire a professional to scrub it for you.
> People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
My Grandfather used to tell a story about an old aeroplane that wouldn't start. They found a retired engineer who agreed to come out and look. Did so, had a listen when they tried, And nodded to himself.
From his toolbox he removed a hammer and smacked the engine once sharply. Suddenly it started right up. Magic
He presented them with a bill for £205. "That's absurd, all you did was hit it with a hammer!".
"Ah yes", the engineer replied. "It is £5 to hit the engine, the other £200 is for knowing where to strike"
(This would typically be as part of a discussion of the meaning of "knowledge is power")
Agreed, my favorite example of this is how people pay like $100 to get a tax-ID number for their new business, which is free from the IRS and with accidental form choices being consequence free, because they think its fraught with disaster or just too obtuse
I think you meant that although it's easy to trivialize what an electrician does, in practice there's actually a lot of skill and experience in it. (I could be wrong, although it's always funny to see how what was probably an off-hand comment causes people to go down such a rabbit hole).
You can get books that teach all the basics, for example there is one called Wiring A House that is pretty good. Then you can usually contact your local building department for the city where you live to get specific questions answered. Unless you live in a place like Chicago where all wiring needs to be in conduit and then that’s a whole different story.
Usually visiting your place of local government / library and asking for a copy of local building codes will get you a hard copy at not much more than cost to photocopy.
These typically reference model codes that are often proprietary. You may still be able to get them from a library but if your question is along the lines of "how many receptacles can I put on one circuit" you need to look in something like the International Residential Code[1], not in your city/state statutes.
> are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack.
'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they do' seems to imply this). Plenty of people are busy and willing to pay for things to have someone else handle the details. Google could easily publicize this but they choose not to.
Here is the thing. Someone charging $500 (or any amount) has already filtered people that feel they have a real need from everyone attempting to do similar. Now you could argue the fee should be less but the friction caused by that higher fee (for those who can afford it) is worth it. And those that can't can do research and effort (like with anything) to find a way to achieve the same.
People often expect everything to be free and nobody to make money off of knowledge. By the way if reputation managers are charging $500 nothing to prevent someone from doing the same for less and changing the market price. Also I'd image the rep managers possibly massage some things to get the job done something many people wouldn't know or want to do.
> There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way.
Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests.
These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it.
In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused.
One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice.
The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely).
FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it".
There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.
You've made good points but they are not related to what I am discussing which is someone charging $500 (if that is the price) to get information off google that google will do (apparently per OP) if you knew the right form.
Anyone knowing the 'right form and place to find it' can charge a price and offer a service. This is quite different than what you are describing that reputation management companies do.
They are fairly narrow categories though, and don't handle things like mugshot sites, even if it's something you were arrested...but not convicted for. Still useful to know for sure.
I'm pretty sure the mugshot sites have adjusted their practices where it's much harder to prove what's really going on. Straight up blackmail payment pages are gone.
Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee.
" Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee."
I don't believe anyone has an obligation to remove if someone found not guilty. The arrest happened, that's a fact. The information is public was made public by the government, that's also a fact.
From my understanding once something is made public you can't put it back in the bag. The government may do so on their own databases (Ie. Expungement, removal from government databases) but that doesn't apply to the public and especially not to publications who have first amendment right to publish public records.
I looked up the case you mentioned, it's still pending and the arguments made by the government are questionable
You're focusing on the "public record", when you need to be focusing on what constitutes blackmail, extortion, bribery, etc.
And while expungement is a complicated thing, it generally means that legally, it never happened. That has tons and tons of different legal interpretations even within one jurisdiction, depending on the who/what/why.
For instance you might be legally protected to claim you were never arrested when getting your driver's license, or applying for a job, but not on a concealed-carry permit application.
Depending on how a 3rd party distributes that expunged info, it could be considered libel or slander, especially once the publisher/speaker is made aware of the falsehood, or given a court order, yet persists.
Judges don't usually bother ordering newspapers to try and collect and destroy what's already been distributed, but...
Papers are certainly not allowed to reprint it or continue to publish/distribute after they've been given whatever constitutes legal notice. At least some jurisdictions will award punitive-damage-multipliers for continuing to distribute those falsehoods after some point where they should have known not to.
So if you're sending out an email newsletter, you might be ok by not sending that issue to anyone else.
But leaving the same content on a website would probably be considered "continuing to publish."
Which basically means: it's complicated.
And that doesn't even touch the blackmail or extortion elements.
No, libel/slander/defamation has nothing to do with distributing factual information, including expunged records.
Judges can't order you not to publish factual information. If they do, it's against the constitution and your First Amendment rights.
While a person can claim the event never happened, it doesn't change the fact that it did, and doesn't take your constitutional rights from talking about it.
Expungements are different everywhere, but consider the next step of trial and conviction.
If a criminal is convicted of a felony, papers can publish that. If he's then exonerated, continuing to call him a convicted felon in future publications is a legal falsehood.
Saying he was tried, convicted, then exonerated (and possibly expunged), and is not a felon would likely be ok.
Which is why I said it highly depends on how it's said.
Because truth/falsehood determination is going to be decided as a matter of fact by the jury during trial, so intent, deception, and reputation will likely sway jurors. And the standard for a civil trial is the much easier "preponderance of evidence/causality" (as opposed to "beyond a reasonable doubt" of criminal trials).
Your constitutional right is to be able to talk about it, but that doesn't mean there won't be a cost or penalty or damages for doing so.
As opposed to what many have recently claimed, the constitutional right of free speech does protect even false, hateful, or even threatening speech. That doesn't mean said speech will be free of consequences. Look at the history of reporters being jailed for refusing to name a source. Many times it's their right to do that, and many times they go to jail anyway.
Sort of. Some police departments publish them, some don't. Some publish them only day of, then remove them. Some only show them if you do the right kind of search (last/first/ maybe + birth). The predatory mugshot sites scrape these variations and publish them in a "forever" way, with lots of SEO tricks. Then basically shake you down for payment to remove them.
I'd like to take this opportunity to share some relevant exercepts from In The Plex[^1] about Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google.
> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.
> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.
> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...
To Google's credit, it's literally the first search results for "how do I remove myself from Google". It is a bit ironic that people looking to remove something for being too easy to find via search are being stymied by a simple search.
Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.
The problem is they almost never actually honor these requests. I know several victims of stalking (including myself) who have had no luck with these forms, even when we've met the narrow and extreme criteria required including doxxing, death threats, etc. And if the forms don't work, there is no option B: courts will reject any challenges to remove content due to section 230, and if they won't take it down, then Google won't either and you're just stuck dealing with it indefinitely. It's been a special kind of hell that I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy. It impacts your reputation, your career, your friends, etc. It makes you suspicious of everyone because you don't know when it's just another stalker digging for more dirt. Section 230 really needs a carve-out for cyberstalking and extortion.
This is an example of a large central authority censoring information.
How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content?
An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities.
The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?
Everyone, please DO NOT underestimate people's malicious will to abuse weak minority groups having un-moderated platforms as their primary tool. Due to lack of Telegram's basic moderation, those victims had been severely abused to the unrecoverable level, more than two years. This could've been at least mitigated if they simply closed the room based on user reporting, which they refused to do so.
> Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?
My answer is No.
The "genuinely harmful content" is minimally harmful compared to the damage censorship can do.
The problem is always with people being dicks, not the information. E.g. a jilted lover posting porn videoes of an ex is only a problem because the lover will deliberately attempt to show them to the ex and the ex's social contacts (and even that is only harmful because some people are judgemental bastards. Yes, some people like scat, get over it), so target the lover with harassment charges rather than making the information distribution illegal.
I'm a bit of a freedom of information purist, I think a world with 0 censorship would be better than the current one, as the censors will always be tempted to censor more and more things to advance their interests. The maximum badness from zero censorship is much much lower than the maximum badness with censorship.
what is lacking in your view is empathy. It seems you don't understand what it is to be the victim, for no good damn fault of you. Moreover in your 'solution', once the videos have leaked on-line to fulfil the ex-lover revenge, it will never be taken out. Fast forward 10 years later, the ex-lover has served its sentence, the victim moved to another place, another job, every thing is forgotten. At their work, they got into a heated debate about any topic. The adversarial debater, seeing red, searched the web, find the video and broadcast to everybody. There might be regrets the second after sending, but it's too late, *once again*
It's not about people being dicks it's about information as weapons laying around forever.
Humans have built-in forgetness but modern days tech does not. Since we are evolving at nature rate, technology must be rein in from time to time.
I admit I do struggle to understand that type of victimhood. Probably because my social circle would not care about whatever obscure fetishes I have unless it's kiddy diddling, nor would most even want to see my sex tape (and I'd struggle to care if they had).
However, people are quite capable of being very unpleasant to eachother without sex videos, if it wasn't that the person seeing red would have done something else (keyed car, sabotage, malicious lies... plenty of options). Regardless they should be disciplined, probably fired outright.
Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block.
This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.
The honest answer here is that I don't trust any authority to be the "authority on information" and to be able to decide what I may or may not be able to see. I expect the search engine to be a search engine and not an "allowed material" repository.
History shows that an authority on anything would be abused sooner or later and if you live in a totalitarian country the technical ability to censor information is the last thing you want anyone having
I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take.
What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
The problem we have today is that there are too many foreign companies deciding what we can and can't say or do. Crypto has the exact opposite problem, but unless our governments step up and regulates these companies in the interests of the public our only option (if you don't agree with the censorship) is to create something uncensorable.
It's not just companies. It's differing jurisdictions. The Middle East would hold that promoting homosexuality is "harmful" (not unlike the US even a few years into the 21st century). China would hold that it is harmful to promote a different political party than the CCP. India finds it harmful for people to kiss in public. There is no legal process that discerns "truly harmful" material from that which is perceived. Harm or lack thereof is limited to individual assessment
I appreciate this response! I agree that a legal process seems to be the best solution (so far) to collectively deciding what is and isn't ok.
The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain?
Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?
It may not be able to remove it, but it certainly can make viewing, storing or disseminating it illegal and punish those that do.
Ultimately a legal system is how a society controls a governments monopoly on violence. A legal system can remove almost anything if it really want too, by virtue of the fact that it can send big men with guns to destroy whatever physical manifestations of the thing exists.
Of course there are practical limits to this power. But that’s never stopped a government before.
>I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take.
>What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
What is interesting is that I wouldn't even have to change a single word here and I can equally apply this reasoning to encryption. It is almost always unpopular on HN to suggest that universal end-to-end encryption might not be a great idea or that encryption backdoors are something that need to be seriously discussed, but those opinions are born out of the same underlying logic.
Free speech is good, but no society wants universal free speech since there are legitimately evil people who will use their speech for malicious means. Same is true about encryption. Why are we ok with removing revenge porn from Google results but need to just accept that we are allowing child porn to be shared via easily encrypted channels?
The difference is that strong encryption is an all or nothing proposition. You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried.
Selective censorship by central authorities can be granular, choosing to create a legal process for selective censorship doesn’t suddenly allow any person on the internet to potentially censor any thing they want. Weak encryption however allows anyone, anywhere, with enough effort to break all encryption everywhere, and do so without without detection or needing to expose themselves via a legal system.
Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
>You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried.
This is always stated as a universal truth of the technology, but this mostly seems like a people and organizational problem. We already have encryption algorithms that can encrypt content for decryption by multiple optional keys. Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities? That would require coordination and agreement to decrypt anything. That wouldn't be a true backdoor anymore than the original key is a backdoor, it would simply be overhead on the existing encrypted content to allow it to be decrypted by multiple keys.
>Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption, but the people who do that will be a tiny share of overall communication. Laws like this aren't meant to completely stop something. Putting in financial regulations to crack down on money laundering doesn't stop money laundering. The goal is to make it more difficult and prevent the most egregious cases.
> Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities?
There would be thousands if not millions of legitimate decryptions every year. At each instance all of the fragments will need to be put together, creating an opportunity for the data to be exfiltrated.
Additionally your making the assumption that legal agencies will be able to securely store these keys long term (I.e forever). Regardless of your view on the operational and security competency of these agencies, it’s extreme difficulty to keep cryptographic keys secure long term if you need to be able to access them on a regular basis.
Even if you don’t think most criminal organisations will manage this, you can pretty much guarantee that large nation state actors like China and Russia will find a way to get hold of these keys. You then give your largest competitors the ability to seriously damage your economy or steal secrets by either using the keys themselves, or leaking them on the internet. Suddenly every single message sent by every citizen, politician, bank, weapons company etc becomes public for all to see.
> This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption
You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code, or pre-built binaries for a working crypto system, of which there are many. Banning the big companies from using crypto isn’t enough, you also need to ban anyone from talking about crypto as well.
This is very different to money laundering rules. Realistically you can’t opt out of the modern financial system, regardless of what blockchain proponents say, so introducing rules to gatekeep money flows at system choke points makes sense. Also one ability to censor money at choke points doesn’t also create an opportunity for enemies to exploit those same choke points.
The money laundering equivalent of crypto censorship would be like the US deciding that it was going to switch to Bitcoin so that all transactions are public and accessible to law enforcement. Then just kinda hoping that a country like China isn’t going to launch a 51% attack.
Your first three paragraphs are all focusing on structural flaws with my suggestion and not technical limitations of encryption itself. The debate has already moved from this is impossible to this is impractical. We can fix impractical. For example, we can design a way for content to be reencrypted with new keys if anything ever leaks.
>You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code...
Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law. That is the point. You would need to jump through a variety of hoops in order to avoid this. It wouldn't be impossible, but it won't be the default and most people won't go through the effort to do it.
> Your first three paragraphs are all focusing on structural flaws with my suggestion and not technical limitations of encryption itself. The debate has already moved from this is impossible to this is impractical.
I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.
In theory traffic laws should prevent 100% of car accidents. Yet people die every day in traffic accidents.
In theory the judicial system should never execute an innocent person. Yet the US sends people later proven innocent to the electric chair on a semi regular basis.
In theory everyone should have a strong interest is keeping planet earth healthy enough to support human life, yet we’re on a course to cataclysmic climate change.
Alcohol addiction should have ended during prohibition, and weed should be impossible to buy in the US. Yet neither is true.
What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?
> Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law.
Cool we’ll host it on Gitlab then, or one of many no US hosting providers. We can’t even stop people pirating movies despite the media industry throwing billions at the problem. Do you honestly think we’ll have better luck with crypto?
You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?
>I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.
Then let's as an industry try to think through ways to fix these impractical problems. My original goal was not for you and me to design the perfect system in a quick HN conversation. I was instead pointing out that the tech community too often treats this issue as a mathematical impossibility and refuses to engage anyone who pushes back on that. Admitting that something is not impossible but rather so impractical as to be essentially impossible is the first step in figuring out a solution. It is unlike the tech community to see an extremely difficult problem and just refuse any attempt to solve it because of the difficulty.
>What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?
I am repeating myself here, but the goal isn't 100% compliance. No law can achieve that and I don't know you you are projecting that expectation on this conversation. The goal is to address most occurrences.
>You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?
People want to engage in vices. I'm not convinced that people have nearly as strong of a desire for complete privacy as evident by all the behavior we have seen over the last few decades in responses to how governments and corporations invade privacy. It is a popular conspiracy theory that Facebook is secretly recording audio on your phone 24/7 and uses conversations it hears to better target ads. I have multiple friends who genuinely believe this. This belief isn't enough to get them to uninstall Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from their phones. Some people will certainly be willing to go the extra mile for privacy, but most people won't.
> People want to engage in vices. I'm not convinced that people have nearly as strong of a desire for complete privacy as evident by all the behavior we have seen over the last few decades in responses to how governments and corporations invade privacy.
The people law enforcement wants to access is supposedly those traffic CP, terrorise or similar crimes. Those individuals 100% want privacy and will get it.
As for the remaining 99%, there’s no evidence that strong encryption prevents law enforcement from doing their job effectively. Want to see examples of law enforcement circumventing perfect encryption, then look to British police. They solved this problem quite elegantly, you wait for someone to unlock their phone, then you grab it out of their hands.
Because it’s detached from reality and shows a misunderstanding of how deeply embedded secure crypto is into everything. Nearly every X86 processor now supports AES intrinsics that are used in the building blocks of far beyond encrypting messages (e.g. golang’s hashing).
Additionally, a from scratch implementation of AES in JavaScript or any other modern programming language is a junior level task. Unless you propose trying to ban every copy of the AES algorithm, it will be trivially implemented and passed around regardless of what FAANG does.
Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.
>Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.
You are treating encryption as an independent end goal by itself when it is only a tool that is used during communication and storage. Communication and to a lesser extent storage are highly centralized. How much of the average person's encrypted communication occurs in a channel that is not touched by some US company?
It's not all or nothing, at all. The argument is about whether the material can be theoretically legally recovered like Gmail and Facebook Messenger (currently), or not, like WhatsApp. All these services use encryption and are secure.
I wouldn't say it's all or nothing. Several of the more regressive countries already demand access to decryption keys. The government gets easy access to the data but it's still hard for the non-state bad guys to intercept.
Huh? The google example is about content being available in public, essentially the equivalent of someone posting dirty / embarrassing pictures in a public square and needing there to be a way to take them down. That sounds pretty reasonable.
The encryption example is about being able to intercept private communication (never mind outlawing math) because someone could use that private communication for something illegal.
The two examples have nothing to do with each other IMO.
Personally I'm not convinced the rewards outweigh the risks in regards to encryption, at least not at this moment in time. But again, I'd much rather issues like these were debated democratically than some tech company deciding one day that they need to view my private messages to "protect the children".
But to your point, if the sharing of child porn or other illegal content ever got so bad that something urgently needed to be done I would personally be open to limiting the use E2EE (if there truly was no better option) and I'd assume most people here would agree, although I would argue in many cases it's E2EE that prevents you from becoming a victim of things like revenge porn in the first place.
The thing about E2EE is that it's not something that you can meaningfully ban in a non-totalitarian society. RSA boils down to one fairly simple formula, for example, or a Perl one-liner. People who really need it will figure it out.
Besides, there would be quite a few people who'd be actively circumventing any such law if it were enacted, e.g. by hosting the apps in other jurisdictions. And I think that's a good thing! There should be fundamental limits on the power of governance, regardless of how democratic said governance is; and democracies can be no less abusive than other forms when it comes to minorities etc. Or even majorities, when established public mores essentially require widespread hypocrisy - the Prohibition comes to mind. "Think of the children" (or terrorists, or whatever is the go-to political excuse at any particular moment) is not a valid exception.
>I'd much rather issues like these were debated democratically than some tech company deciding one day that they need to view my private messages to "protect the children".
I agree with your general point except most people in the tech community are not willing to even have these debates. It is often treated as an issue with a single right answer and that encryption can never be compromised.
Removing ourselves from the debate is only going to end up with the decision being made without our input.
So, like, I get what you're saying, but I feel like you didn't actually look past the title of the post. This isn't governments censoring information or whatever, it's a form you can fill out to request removal of coerced personal information like revenge porn or doxxing.
I understand what the post is saying. I see this as an example of censorship (by Google in this case) being a GOOD thing. This caused me to wonder about how a decentralized platform would handle similar circumstances.
No, no information should ever be banned from any public/commons - the end. You want to ban certain information from a particular place you control? Go nuts. The wider public? No.
The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind free exchange and scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed.
This is not a road worth going down, for any amount of harm reduction. The cost today may be worth it. The cost long term is potentially too great to even consider risking. There is no guarantee of who holds the ban hammer tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing. Do you think there is ever a scenario where information should be censored from the public at large? (Child porn, or you or your family getting ‘doxxed’, for example)
I appreciate the take that the future harm isn’t worth the benefit today, since we’d enable future arbiters to control what is available.
There’s nuance in determining what is a public sphere vs. a privately controlled platform. The places with the most distribution are currently private, but crypto could change that to where we collectively own the platform, effectively making it publicly owned. Does that change your thoughts on when censorship is appropriate?
I think there's lots of information that should be censored, and if I were made data czar of the world I would surely not be corrupt and do a diligent and thoughtful job removing only what must be removed for the good of the world.
But I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to do the same. Would you?
Nobody ever argued that molecules of air and ink have some duty to participate in enforcing laws prohibiting various types of speech and the press, I guess because it was never possible. Bits and bytes are rapidly supplanting ink and air for many types of communication, and they do make it possible to censor those communications at a deeper level than ever before.
So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?
Hm - I think something to consider is who's information it really is that you want removed. Information that I put up isn't Google's to remove, but if I want to do that, should I have the right? Especially if it's actively harmful to me and benefits nobody (see previous mentions of non-consensual sharing of explicit images), shouldn't I have control over it? If I am wholly responsible for the existence of some unique content, or it was created against my wishes, I think it's within right to control it (to the extent that practicality allows).
For clarity: this shouldn't apply to information that a corporation produces, because corporations aren't people and shouldn't have the same freedoms. Open source is still good, and controlling information that you discover, not that you invent, is unreasonable.
Overall, my issue is less with control over information (because if you believe all control is bad, then you have to say that revenge porn isn't too big an issue, and that's not a position I'm personally willing to take) and more capital's control over information because of all the cases when capital is misaligned with the interests of the people who need it. All of these cases feel like they define technology. Lots of the history of technology can be understood as large companies (bourgeoisie) trying to keep information hidden fighting a decreasing population of 'hackers' (the proletariat), and that fight's legacy is found here, on Google's hidden page gatekeeping what should be known.
Voluntary removal of one's own information does not, in theory go against the free exchange of ideas, but it's a difficult path to follow. How do you grant removal powers to only the owner of something? If you hold a private key, that's easy enough to work something out. I am completely fine with somebody using a key to put something out there and later using the same key to remove it. It's theirs.
...but that's not always the case. If your information has been copied against your will in a way that removes that key (which is incredibly hard to prevent, see the "analog hole" problem in video DRM), you have to have some sort of central authority or master key to be able to remove it, and then you're again falling right back into trusting that central authority with the power to remove whatever they deem fit. What if the central authority decides you don't own the information and not to remove it? What if they claim ownership of something they want removed that isn't theirs?
It just doesn't work. Information removal is a superpower I do not trust any large organization to wield responsibly.
I'd love to walk into a business without shoes or a shirt and demand service. For some crazy reason these businesses are allowed to restrict my liberty on their property.
Having your access restricted based on readily-remedied conditions, based on consideration for the common weal, or to one of numerous potential suppliers or vendors, is different from access restrictions based on flat-out retaliation, intimidation, coercion, historic social discriminatory bases, and/or to the sole, overwhelming majority, or most attractive (low cost, convenience, features, compatibility/interactivity) provider.
The "private business right of refusal" argument has some merits, but also substantial equity and justice problems.
I guess I'm thinking more about a "decentralized Google" where it's impossible to remove things like revenge porn. Is there anything we can/should do about that potential?
Not quite, the analogy breaks down here… discoverability vs. accessibility is different. Both contribute to the distribution of content. Google solves one part of that equation, but I’m referring to total decentralized distribution.
When talking about the blockchain and other voluntary systems, I tend to look at these things from a "what if there was no government that could just use physical coercion to implement its laws, how would you get people to voluntarily sign up for this?" perspective for these kinds of problems.
You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed.
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.
Obviously you can use courts and the police in the form of the existing government. That works fine. We're trying to figure out how to do this in a borderless global internet via blockchain and so forth.
The victim would contact the organizations and ask that they remove the material citing their mission and bylaws. Maybe they would form a hierarchy with the most generally agreed upon rules being shared, like a treaty, between blockchains.
Always good to rehash the same exact conversation over and over for ... 13 years now. Can we at least pretend to learn something from every other time this exact conversation has played out?
No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)
Mastodon handles this almost perfectly. No one can take down an ActivityPub server, but moderators can choose to not sync with hostile actors. If the users disagree with the moderator's decision, they migrate to another host and take all their data with them.
I freaked a bunch of FBI agents out a while back by Base64 encoding a photo of an FBI logo and writing that to the Eth chain. They have massive concerns around this regarding data exfiltration. The cost of removing the data, once written to a chain, is essentially equal to the market cap of the coin for that chain.
What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?
> People already added it into bitcoin if you stretch the definition a bit.
Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art.
There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data.
Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim, which shows the legs this false meme has on it.
I agree that a hash of data != the source data, but these links seem to indicate that it is at least possible, if not already evident, that illegal images and content can be encoded into the bitcoin blockchain (and presumably other blockchains that permit similar writing to the ledger)
Really? That’s very sad, but I’m not too surprised.
(Unless you’re saying that the bits 0 and 1 already exist in the blockchain, which is reaaaaallllyyy stretching the definition.)
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessing illegal material.
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessions illegal material.
It is amazing that the output of a random number generator can be considered a core part of a DMCA-style 'illegal to work around' anti-circumvention solution.
Because the data is there _forever_ and there's not really anything they can do about it, which stands in stark contrast to how they're used to operating.
There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it.
The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online.
FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
Well I don't have any actual secret bunker blueprints or nuclear submarine specs or w/e. It was an extremely simple PoC where I gave them them an Eth txID and a link to a site like https://base64.guru/converter/decode/image/jpg
The point wasnt that I put their logo on a chain, its that I could put a photo online that the states monopoly on violence was entirely incapable of removing.
Are you asking why it freaked out real FBI agents or the ones in lozaning's imagination?
The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is.
For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration".
I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
The FBI is used to situations where they can issue targeted takedown orders when groups publish illegal information, but blockchain setups complicate the situation. How does a company "providing" an immutable blockchain stop providing illegal / unlicensed content? Does the fact that their blockchain contains illegal / unlicensed content mean the service is illegal to operate in the US? The alternative is having some sort of legal safe harbor where there is content that, in other circumstances, you would not be allowed to distribute but you can because you are on the blockchain.
"It has come to the attention of the FBI that “Fair Use Warnings” accompanied by an image of the FBI seal (or similar insignia) have been posted on various websites, giving the appearance that the FBI has created or authorized these notices to advise the public about the fair use doctrine in U.S. copyright law. The FBI recognizes that the fair use of copyrighted materials, as codified in Title 17, United States Code, section 107, does not constitute infringement. These warnings, however, are not authorized or endorsed by the FBI. Unauthorized use of the FBI seal (or colorable imitations) may be punishable under Title 18 United States Code, Sections 701, 709, or other applicable law." [1]
They're both distributed. The fact that anyone _can_ archive anything forever reasonably excludes the assumption that it's not, accessibility/curation notwithstanding.
You don't undo a harm by trying to erase it. If the porn has been created/recorded the ex has a copy and could upload it to non-block chain locations. Once he shares it it has been decentralized.
There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.
The internet is incomprehensibly vast. Yes, there might be a copy (or multiple copies) of a video you made in your youth on the internet. But as long as it isn't a) prominently available and b) attached to your name, you might be OK.
The situation we have today does allow you to address such a problem: Google can remove search results. It's not possible to do that on the blockchain.
The blockchain is vast and growing. Discovery is difficult.
Google prevents new searches or tries to but if you have the link you can visit without google. Same as the blockchain you would need to know where to look.
But still you can try making it harder to access by cutting the major distribution channels, which perhaps will significantly reduce its propagation velocity. With whatever technologies that refuse to fix this issue, you cannot. This is a critical difference for law enforcement.
And as someone who has worked in the blockchain space for a long time, it’s pretty much unanimously agreed in the space that the cost of inevitably protecting bad actors is worth the value in protecting good actors. Good and bad are subjective there, but for better or worse the blockchain isn’t.
...what? I've known of this for at least a decade. Do people expect Google to be some free-for-all of unmoderated knowledge that can be used to defame and degrade others?
The story focuses on a software engineer who discovered that he was the slander target of someone who had been fired by his father 30 years ago. He found her identity and took her to court in 2018. But the libelous Google results didn't change. The NYT story even ends with this:
> Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.”
If a software engineer with the resources to find and take an anonymous libeler didn't know that Google could manually intervene and remove results that listed him as a pedophile, I'm assuming the vast majority of people are equally unaware.
>Until recently, Google would remove a website from your results only if it could cause financial damage, such as by exposing your Social Security number. Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information.
No wonder few people know it. On the "until recently" checking the Internet Archive[0], removal of any personal information was introduced to their page at end of 2019. Before then the only way was removing the information from the sites to which the result link pointed.
Cool, the section "Remove content about me on sites with exploitative removal practices from Google" seems custom-crafted to handle sites like RipoffReport. https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9172218
Which makes one wonder why Google doesn't simply make it a policy to delist sites like RipoffReport and the mugshot harvesting sites (and public-record-PII-publishing sites) as spammy dictionary bullshit in the first place and be proactive about this.
They run the index, they get to decide what's in it or not.
What I was wondering is how do they verify that the person is the one requesting themselves be removed? Can you technically have all results of someone that you don't like be removed? I could see that harming businesses if your name is often associated with your websites around your business.
It raises the question of how they can find that many hits to be removed, they must be spamming the hell out of the index, and Google must be allowing it/providing an API.
I'm a dox victim and live in Europe. I've tried to use my right to be forgotten and used Google's removal request, to which the answer was:
"It is Google’s understanding that the information about you on this URL - with regard to all the circumstances of the case we are aware of - is still relevant in relation to the purposes of data processing, and therefore the reference to this document in our search results is justified by the public interest.
Based on the information available to us at this time, Google LLC has decided not to take action on this URL."
I've now tried the other URL, but I doubt this will help.
What's also surprising is how bad Google is at processing these requests. It’s almost like a PR stunt. I’ve had to use their EU Privacy Removal form in the past and a single response can take anything from a few days to several weeks to no response at all. Half the time it seems like you’re emailing a bot as I’ve received the same canned reply to simple inquiries. In the end I just gave up.
The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others.
On a slightly unrelated but nevertheless interesting issue: a while back I wanted to find an “incel” board to see how discourse thereon actually was, and Google returned no direct results to any of them but DuckDuckGo immediately returned the results one might expect when searching “incel forum”.
That's particularly sad. It is proof that the incel community really does enough "damage" that they have to be suppressed. I am curious as to when this was removed, and why it was removed.
It really wouldn't be so much of a problem if Google didn't command 90%+ market share in many countries.
Anecdotally I remember a fine example from a few years ago when Matt Cutts proclaimed they had algorithmically solved spam for queries such as payday loans. A day later, one appeared with Mr Cutts selling payday loans. It was removed within 24 hours.
If people don't know about this, they haven't been paying attention. I find the idea that 'even experts' (haha) don't know about this rather hilarious.
Few people know that Google Search also voluntarily censors search results for political reasons. Probably by request of CIA/State department. Such blacklists appeared on wikileaks. Which was esp. ironic that Google employees fought the very same feature on the search product for the Chinese market "Dragonfly" (blacklisting tianmanmen and such)
Was there ever an explanation for why duckduck go prevented searching for the "tankman" image the other week? Google fixed it pretty fast but last I checked it's still blocked on duckduckgo.
Yeah also if you compare results from google vs duckduckgo for controversial search terms like "I don't care about gender identity"
Google will return only content that tells you why that opinion is wrong e.g. "why you should care about gender identity"
Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search.
Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform.
Its actually really egregious once you start testing it out. To the point that google actually completely buries really valuable information such as primary sources for controversial events, scientific studies etc and instead promotes shitty wapo articles ans the like that tell you how to think about the thing you are actually searching for.
You're making a huge leap by assuming this is because such a subject isn't politically correct or whatever. There's many more likely explanations:
• You have phrased the search in a way that people expressing that view wouldn't be likely to use, yet is similar to how people holding contrary views would express theirs. I think that's the case here. If you search for “gender does not exist” or so, you may get the results you want.
• Google's results are customised based on what they think you would be interested in.
• Content from one side of a contentious topic may be less popular online and/or not linked to as many authoritative sites, and thus have a lower PageRank.
1) my point was specifically if you search for a phrase that would have been used one 1 side of an argument you often get the other side if its a politically contentious issue. E.g. why would a blog that is pro gender identity related stuff contain the phrase "I dont care about gender identity"
2) so I am clearly of a more conservative bent, yet google frequently gives articles which are hostile to conservative views. So if its doing this its doing a terrible job.
3) agreed. And that is, imo, problematic. Or at least really fucking obnoxious and kneecaps the utility of google.
> Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform
Reminds me that yesterday I tried googling around the topic of how covid affects fertility (eg. "covid fertility") and nearly every result that comes back is about vaccines not affecting fertility. Okay, thanks Google, but how about the actual disease? Results were a fair bit more relevant by adding "disease" to the query, but still got one or two about vaccines.
I don't think you can call that behaviour favouring left. It feels as though they're creating vaccine hesitancy.
COVID-19 is a special case. I think Google has intervened there to ensure that official sources are favoured due to concerns about the impact of misinformation in a pandemic specifically. This is not a common Google practice so far as I know.
But that's my point. If someone searches for "covid fertility" and Google unexpectedly decides to make it all about vaccines, in a way, they are a source of misinformation. Where someone was previously concerned with fertility as a result of covid the disease, Google makes them start considering fertility as it relates to vaccines instead, essentially going against their search intent & pointing them in the wrong direction.
Perfect example. Had the exact aame experience. As someone who leans more right wing, I call it left skewed, but yes you are right it is not necessarily purely left aligned, or even at all. It feels like just any controversial opinion just gets obliterated by their ranking algorithm (in the case if covid I would bet a million dollars there was manual intervention in the name of public health tho)
But in this case they're transforming a concern about covid into a concern about the covid vaccine. Doesn't even make sense in the name of public health.
Perhaps much of it is not ideological on Google's part but actually simply the machine learning about what people want to see.
It's entirely possible that such a disproportionate number of persons is more likely to access links about vaccines and such politics than what you searched for that the machine, not the man, has elected to favor those without having any real political motive.
That did cross my mind. If it's actually due to that, then Google is just going to become increasingly terrible & always directing you to the most searched thing.
Look up "proof the moon landing was fake". I have an aerospace degree and don't think it was fake, but I still find it strange that Google won't return any of the conspiracy pages I enjoyed reading about a decade ago.
This does run into the same problem that Wikipedia runs into, that it insists on using “credible” or “reputable” sources but does not really bother to define that, and it essentially comes down to that sources are not “credible” for disagreeing with their beliefs.
Personally, I have yet to see any “credible” news source and the adage remains that every news article about anything I have even the most minor inside knowledge of seems completely inaccurate, especially the politically laden ones.
No matter what mechanism Google uses to assign such ranking: be it their own judgement or simply an agnostic a.i. that lets the masses decide, I cannot see anything good coming from it and there will always be a bias not based in factuality, but politics.
> I cannot see anything good coming from it and there will always be a bias not based in factuality, but politics.
Well, Google isn't omnipotent and thus it only echos back results which are popular with people, which is basically politics, so yes. If everyone tomorrow instantly started thinking the world was flat (and previous flat earthers start saying the world is round) Google's results would shift pretty dramatically to whatever is the most popular side.
Perhaps people of his, and my own, ilk are looking for results that match the search they perform?
Why would I care about how popular a result is if all I want is to find a specific web page or a specific piece of information...
I just Googled "I don't care about gender identity" and the top results are all agreeing with that statement.
The search is working perfectly. Google isn't inserting any kind of left-wing bias whatsoever. It's finding the same types of pages as DuckDuckGo does as well.
I hadn't tried that particular search. Heres on I have tried and just double checked it : "I don't care about transgender rights"
The example further down about the moon landing is a much better example though. Its a lot worse right when some political event happens. Like if trump said sonething really controversial and you search for more context around it, on google top results would all be articles about how shitty the thing he said was whereas on DDG youd have a greater probability of actually getting some context.
Like when pandemic was in full swing trying to get information that was against the mainstream narrative was impossible on google but was doable on ddg.
This might not be like an active decision by google but their results do skew really heavy left. It might just be a function of popularity rankings. But id imagine ddg uses a similar ranming system so not sure what makes the difference.
There are times tho when ive searched for something I know exists like word for word and it still wont come up on google but will on ddg so, go figure.
So, the one example you provided you hadn't taken the 10 seconds to validate?
You're not providing value here. Please make an effort to make meaningful and additive comments instead of spewing misinformation or made up anecdotes.
I'd ask if that error might be better understood as downranking of two things that seem very reasonable to downrank in a search engine (something designed to return accessible and useful information):
- bigots motivated by animosity towards minorities
- open contempt for the truth
Hard to feel there's a compelling interest in supporting bigotry when knowledge is best advanced by open inquiry and the net result of bigotry is a suppression of voices which will lead to less knowledge.
As to conspiracies and lies? Very little truth value there, unclear why Google would want to uprank that kind of content.
Were there real debates about truth with actors in good faith on both sides, I might be more open to your framing of the problem as left wing vs right wing.
Yeah so thats the thing. You are just immediately assuming that you are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong and a horrible person. Personally, I see people obsessed with gender identity as being wrong, anti-truth, anti science, disingenuous, etc.
So thats my point : I don't want google to give me the truth, I want it to give me the internet, warts and all. I don't want google to gatekeep the information I have access to. Lol I remember everyone being in a tizzy when net neutrality gor the axe cause ISPs would start gatekeeping. But if a wholesome company like google does it its in pursuit of truth.
Why did you start using Google in the first place? Their early papers on PageRank/BackRub describes how their algorithm filters for quality, and their most prominent example is explicitly political:
> As an example which illustrates the use of PageRank, anchor text, and proximity, Figure 4 shows Google's results for a search on "bill clinton". These results demonstrates some of Google's features. The results are clustered by server. This helps considerably when sifting through result sets. A number of results are from the whitehouse.gov domain which is what one may reasonably expect from such a search. Currently, most major commercial search engines do not return any results from whitehouse.gov, much less the right ones.
> ...The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily.
To be fair, I asked the question because you made a sweeping assertion about others being "anti-truth/anti-science", which implies you'd be more cognizant and knowledgeable about the algorithms and mindset behind Google back "in the good ol days".
Dude I think you took that way out of context.
I was just providing the counterpoint to someone who was claiming their opinion constituted an absolute truth both factually and morally. Thats all.
That isn't exactly how Google sorts or filters results today.
"Yes, we do use PageRank internally, among many, many other signals. It's not quite the same as the original paper, there are lots of quirks (eg, disavowed links, ignored links, etc.), and, again, we use a lot of other signals that can be much stronger." [1]
> Personally, I see people obsessed with gender identity as being wrong, anti-truth, anti science, disingenuous, etc.
Well, yes, that's the basis of the anti-trans campaign: obsession. It ends up taking over people and causing them to become mono maniac posters on the subject, sometimes to the detriment of their careers. It's worse than scientology.
People not caring about gender identity would in many cases be a huge improvement.
Another issue is the usage of BERT and other dense vector techniques. These are not as good at bm-25/tf-idf for information retrieval. This is one reason why google search results these days do a poor job when you need direct keyword based results.
Also, google has always personalized their search results (personalized pagerank) and maybe that's impacting you?
One might even say that they filter their results in order to promote a preferred ideology. To propagandize us, even.
Search any modern hot topic on Google. Do the same on one of the various alternative search engines (duckduckgo, for example). Compare the results. It's educational.
My goal, in case it's not clear, was to find out more about how dates are commonly used in Cambodia (for some localisation code I was writing). DDG just gave me "uncensored" spam sites about dating Cambodian women (I didn't check any of them out, but I'd wager quite a few, if not all, are just scams, if not worse). And while the Google results also weren't quite what I was looking for, it sure was a hell of a lot more relevant.
> One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?...
Down the thread, she adds this:
> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack.
I didn't know about this service URL, and had just assumed "reputation managers", if they did anything at all, were limited to SEO spamming.
edit: Searched HN for mention of this link and found exactly 5 results, 3 of which look unique, and the earliest in Dec. 23, 2015:
https://imgur.com/EEUJn9M