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Best Way To Clear Your Name Online?
An anonymous reader writes "About fifteen years ago, I did something that I've come to regret on a university computer system. I was subsequently interviewed by a Federal law enforcement agency, although no charges were pressed and I have no criminal record as a result of my actions. At the time, I discussed the matter with a friend of mine who went on to mention it briefly in a text file zine with a small distribution list. I've generally tried to keep a low profile online and until recently there's been very little information about me available from the major search engines. Unfortunately, that zine mention was picked up by textfiles.com at some point and mirrored across the world. I've tried to address this with the owner of the site, but couldn't get anywhere. Even if my name in the source file is altered, cached copies will continue to link me with my youthful mistake. Have any other Slashdot readers had a similar experience? What practical steps would your readers recommend to prevent this information from hurting me? I am concerned that future employers may hold my past actions against me should they look for me online as part of their screening process."
Be a man and take responsibility for your actions.
Once its on the net, its on the net.
And I'm an idiot to this day. Any employer who would hold a youth mistake against you is also an idiot. Especially when you can google their name in return... Nobody is free of skeletons, just try not to have some real bad ones.
Shh.
I'm not sure how bad it is, but if someone types your name in google and the ONLY thing they find is that one thing you don't, then it'll stand out. Try to use your name for everything, so that those things appear first in the results.
If you're "John Smith", I think it will be pretty easy to disclaim being the SAME John Smith unless there are a lot of other matching details.
On the other hand, if your last name is "Szczerbiak", maybe you can make a case for wanting to simplify the spelling and change it.
Basically those are the first two options I can think of -- dodge, and go stand somewhere else.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Not much you can do now, in regards to your online presence.
If an employer asks, calmy explain that it was a youthful mistake. Emphasize that you have not done anything like that since, and that you have a clean record.
Worst case: change your name.l
Did you ever consider taking what you did and using it as a reason they SHOULD hire you?
Just live with it. A reasonable person can see the difference between a simple mistake years ago (especially if there is no conviction) and a habitual law breaker. I sold alcohol to a minor because I was too lazy to check an ID, and it turned out to be a sting. It didn't ruin my life.
Whale
if you manage to smokescreen your online identity with huge amount of positive material that bears your name (i.e. get your name on a lot of popular projects), with lots of cross linking, you will at the very least bury it into non-existance as far as search engines are concerned.
if it's result number 999 on google, i doubt your average employer will read that far into it, and if they do, the amount of positive things that have been said about you will probably outweigh the one negative result
and i'm not sure of US law in this manner, but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?
You just awoke a sleeping giant. As we speak thousands of once idle keyboards are feverishly trying away to unravel the mystery of just who you are and what you did - you even told them where to look. How fond were you of your name?
Create all kinds of web presence - create several blogs and crosslink them to high profile sites. Google juice the heck out of a personal web page you have. Post about work you do on various sites.
It boils down to make it so the one incident is buried in googles results to the second page, and even then - they will see all the positive stuff on the first page and wonder if it is even you.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
That's just setting yourself up for getting fired later for lying to your prospective employer during the interview process.
Bury the text file in search engine results by having a larger on-line presence. Write a blog, submit posts everywhere. Drown it in noise.
Install Ubuntu in Android
First off, to everyone who knows me: This wasn't my story submission
OK, now that's out of the way, I suffer from a related, but not quite so bad situation: I'm pretty much the only Erik Trimble on the Internet (that's not true, but close enough). Google me, and 90% of the first 100 returns point to me, in some way or not (FYI - the MySpace page for "leathercladdemon" isn't me. Really.) There's nothing bad there, it's just that my life has evolved, and having absolutely all of it retained and searchable over the past 20 years allows people to draw incorrect assumptions about me.
This is all the privacy problems that the current young generations seem to be completely oblivious to, and that pundits like to ignore. People's perceptions of you matter, as much as we'd like to think otherwise. That doesn't mean it has to rule your life, but to think that such perceptions don't matter is foolish. The problem with retaining all this data out in the open is that it seriously harms the ability of people to change. And we want people to change. Lots of Very Bad Things happen to society if we forbid people (either legally, or de facto) from changing their paths in life. For just a minor example, look at what being convicted of anything does to one's entire life. It's not good to have complete personal transparency.
I don't have a solution. At least not a simple one. But it needs to understood by everyone that it IS a problem.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
Could easily backfire through the Streisand Effect.
Not really. We're in a bad economy right now, and as such employers are extremely picky. It won't always be that way. It just happens to be that way at the moment.
Those with some years on us realize that it'll get better and past actions won't matter so much.
And just maybe this person has learned to moderate his/her online behaviour because of it. That's not a bad thing.
It's like trying to get pee out of a pool.
do you tell people before you put the pictures up that you can't be bothered to tweak a few pages every 2 months when it becomes desirable for the pictures to come down again?
Or set the site up so that none of the pictures stay up for more than 12 months? (If people want them, they can snaffle them while they're still up)
Or why not set up your robots.txt so that only the frontpage gets indexed?
If you put potentially damaging pictures of people up on your website, you need to be responsible enough beforehand to recognise that you will need to 'budget' more time later to take them down again. If you can't do that, don't put the pictures up.
FGD 135
You're pretty much a dick. From the clips I have seen of the movie, it's kind of homosexual in nature. What if those photos are hurting someone's image or reputation? What if their friends, loved ones or potential squeezes assume this person is gay now? That's awful. If you were talking any other piece, I'd say "That's not so bad"...but you are talking Rocky Horror Picture Show"....that's synonymous with freak.
Have a heart. Don't be selfish.
You intentionally mentioned textfiles.com and a university mistake on slashdot?
I don't believe you are this retard.
You couldn't have made a bigger advertisement for this.
Are you sure you are the original person, or someone who wants to smear someone else?
wow, you are a jerk
If you're lucky the forum has a 'reset password' feature that emails a new password to you. If the email address is still there, the email will go to you; you can then change the account to use some other email address, and eventually that will propagate to Google. Bonus effect: the ass who used your account will lose his access.
Create as much obviously spam content as you can with your name in it. Then distribute it as widely as possible. High a sleazy SEO firm to mirror thousands of instances of this crap content all over the Internet. Write a perl script to automatically generate it, with your name scattered liberally throughout, based on any unholy combination of out-of-copyright literature, online freely available tax lot data, bad poetry, and random Wikipedia articles. Post it on blogs. Post it in forums. Bury your real identity in spam!
When you're done, not only will no one be able to find the original offending zine, but even if they do they won't be able to tell if the info is real.
Alternatively, change your name to "Mike Jones," for which Google already returns 2,390,000 results in only 0.24 seconds.
yea, your an asshole.
Your mother never taught you the difference between what what can be said and what should be said, did she? Very jerkwad-ish of you :(
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The difference is that the audience probably doesn't care to post the names of the performers. Personally I think you just like being an ass.
That last paragraph reads like this:
I take pride in damaging people's reputations.
You're a prick, Shawn McHorse. I wouldn't hire you to mow my lawn. Eat that, google.
Bullshit.
If they are in public then too bad. If they gave permission, either explicit or implicit, then too bad. If they where in a situation where it's to be expected by a reasonable person, then too bad.
Trying to hide or change history of ANY kind is a bad thing.
No one is under any obligation to change something just becasue someone doesn't like it. It's thinking like yours that holds things back.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Trying to hide or change history of ANY kind is a bad thing.
And so would denying a job for a stupid-ass reason like the candidate used to be in Rocky Horror. But I could definitely see it happening. And unfortunately, two wrongs can sometimes make, well, a less-wrong.
Recommendations must, above all else be honest in regards to what YOU know.
As the response above suggests you can say "He did some stupid things in the past, but later he worked very well for me, and I think based on this that he is now a high quality person." Yada... Yadd..
Lay the facts on the table along with your opinion.
As for the original topic. The AC's mistake was keeping a low profile online. HR will be suspicious of anyone with no online identity at all. Especially for tech jobs. However. Let's say you apply for a Sysadmin position, and they search on your name. That search brings back a flood of discussions, forum posts and debates, most of them technology related. After the 1st few pages of boredom they will announce: "This guy is a geek and spends his online time in the company of geeks."
An ancient blog post about a criminal investigation would probably get lost in the torrent.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That's not very nice. You could at least remove their last names so they don't show up in Google.
No offense, but it kind of sounds like you're just being a dick.
I'm sure I could honor requests to remove all of these photos, but I simply don't want to. It involves a lot of time and effort on my end, to accomplish something that's actively taking away from things I take pride in myself.
So basically, you take pride in getting people turned down for jobs in a shit economy because you won't take a few 10YO pics offline. Wow dude, you need to meet some of these people in a dark alley.
Of course, if you consider yourself such an awesome photographer that you just can't bear to ruin the artistic integrity of your site, you could always, y'know, redact their names.
As for how you got modded "insightful", just... Wow. I hope you just managed to sneak a troll post (or some form of sarcasm I totally missed) past the mods, because if serious, you really do suck as a human being.
As a thought experiment: if your local paper sent someone to the show to take pictures for publication would they get releases from the actors? I'm guessing they would, which would put the performance at least in the grey area between public and private. I'm betting (some of) those performers wouldn't have gone to the opera wearing their RHPS lingerie.
Privacy has a contextual component. In this case the context is a performance made *to a like-minded audience*. You can't separate the context of these pictures from the situation in which they were taken. Publishing them openly is a change in context, and is, rightly, being seen as a breach of the performer's privacy expectations.
If it's really only for you and the cast then put it all behind a membership wall. People inactive for too long no longer get access, but you and your cast can see anything from any time. Maybe even allow past cast members to request access. This has the advantage that it doesn't breach the parameters of the original context.
The submitter says that no charges were pressed, charges were pressed against Jesse Hirsch. They were however later dropped.
The submitter says that he was interviewed by feds. "52 division", who arrested Jesse Hirsch is a division of the Toronto Police.
The submitter says that he mentioned it to a friend, who went on to briefly mention it in a zine. The article you linked to is extensive and written in the first person.
So it's not a perfect match, and I wouldn't be surprised if the submitter was not entirely accurate. I don't think anything conclusive can be drawn here. If it is Jesse Hirsch, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Reading the file, it looks like a clear overreaction by the authorities.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If so, I'm not surprised. I was going to try practically the same search terms -- just for the challenge -- and then I thought better of it. "The guy doesn't need the hassle of it showing up on /.", I thought. The second thing I thought was, "Unfortunately, someone has probably already done this and maybe also posted the results."
If that's the guy, it was crazy to post this on /. with a specific web site where your indiscretion was mentioned. You were probably safe without the site, but with it -- wow. Someone could just crawl the whole site and grep it if Google didn't do the job. Why on Earth was it necessary to know the site to understand the story or the question you posed? It wasn't. I'm really sorry, but the first lesson you need to learn if you don't want it to get spread around is: shut up about it! The second lesson is: if you must talk about it (it was a good question, after all), be as vague as possible. There should be nothing beyond the bare minimum needed.
And if it isn't the guy, look at that stuff anyway. Where do you think someone could go next with a name in hand? The warning here is important regardless of whether it's accurate: the web's memory is deep as an ocean, and search engines these days are such that with 15 minutes of searching you could find practically every message in a bottle ever tossed into it. Google is like having a fishing net the size of the ocean. It takes a lot more than AC and some vague descriptions to truly anonymize something on the web.
I never had sex with that woman.
Of course he is under no obligation. He is still an asshole for it though.
I have never written anything that can be used against me but idiots, who I don't even know, have, and have done so years ago. Sometimes I have been successful having the content pulled but sometimes it is based in other countries. Who knows how it has affected me - no one has ever mentioned it to me, but perhaps someone looking at my resume will see something they don't like and I don't get a call.
So my name is on lists in lots of nice capacities - I patch some program, I help this or that project out. If you can Google your name, and one of the first 50 responses is something bad about you, you're probably in trouble. If a few of the first 50 are patches for some software, you helpfully answering someone's question etc., that is better.
I've succeeded in removing my name from a few places, I suggest you being nice about it, and in some cases, dishonest about it.
Or, it could be some guy who doesn't like Jesse Hirsh much, wanting to bump the Anarchives story up nearer the top of Google's search results to tick him off. In which case, thanks for helping.
You are such an idiot for comparing "rewriting history" to "dude dancing around in lingerie."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Some thoughts:
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
No, no NO! Do not abuse the DMCA. It is an evil law, and abusing it opens you to much negative karma (real-life karma, not slashdot karma).
How hard is it to simply remove people's name in the page text? Google doesn't (yet) do face recognition on photographs.
1. Are you still friends with the writer of the zine? Ask them to send a DMCA notice. Don't know if it would work, but may be worth a shot.
Are you insane? Absolutely do not do this. Nothing would be more likely to increase the visibility of the problematic information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Am I reading this right? You get "a half dozen requests per year on average" - or 1 every couple of months - to take down photos, and that's too much work for you?
If you can't take that much time to admin your site, which is minimal, you shouldn't be posting them up in the first place.
Please practice responsible web administration.