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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."
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.
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?
Perhaps he has, but depending on the severity of his college mistake, he could find it hard to ever get another job again. Thanks to the internet's ability to never forget, he's doomed to be repeatedly punished for something he may have already paid for.
Any prospective employer will appreciate the explanation that you gave us.
That's supposed to be sarcasm, right?
Be a man and take responsibility for your actions.
Employers turn down applicants because of photos showing the applicant drinking beer in college. He was interviewed by law enforcement and no charges were filed according to the summary. It sounds like he did take responsibility already. Being denied employment for something trivial isn't "taking responsibility for one's actions," it's being screwed over.
At some point employers are going to realize they're hiring -people- and that all of their employees have had lapses in judgement, and maybe then they'll have reasonable standards. For now though, many seem to think that if their lapses in judgment haven't made it onto the internet, that means they didn't happen, so they should only hire people with absolutely no dirt on their online profile.
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.
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
Yep. Everyone who breaks from the status quo should be punished by everyone with an axe to grind in perpetuity forever and ever.
We have enough "innocent" people that we don't need those "guilty" people to help us.</sarcasm>
Or you could just be honest and say that he had done some stupid things in the past but behaved well during the time he worked for you.
It's no more your job to crucify somebody as it is to defend them.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Employers turn down applicants because of photos showing the applicant drinking beer in college.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to work for any place that turned me down because of some brief Google image search. That kind of shallow screening tells me all I need to know about them. "Unfortunate reality" be damned, I'm allowed to have a private life outside of work, thankyouverymuch.
At any rate, it sounds like this guy needs to smother this one little bad brief mention from years ago with a ton of really good, awesome stuff. What exactly are you doing now? Nothing? Is a law enforcement interview really the most exciting and noteworthy thing you've done in the last few years? If so, then maybe that should be on the first page of results when they Google your name.
No, I want the one that would get caught. I don't need someone stealing from me, I want to catch them. At the same time, I'm not going to force my employees to do something illegal, so their ability to break the law well doesn't help.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Well, in all fairness, it wasn't one mistake, it was at least two. First, he screwed up. Then, after that had more or less blown over, he decided to brag about it.. I mean "mentioned it to a friend who published the details of the exploit using real names". Congrats. You're notorious now. You have your street cred.
If you're REALLY concerned, take comfort in the fact that you are not the only one to ever screw up, and with luck and a long period of time without a history of further screwups, past indiscretions will be all but forgotten.
However, as I see it, you have three options. Either forget about it and hope nobody finds out, embrace it as a life lesson and show how you used the fallout from that event to learn to better take responsibility for your actions.... Or bury it. Publish a huge volume of information to the internet using your real name so eventually anyone searching for you will only find the good stuff and hopefully will get bored before they find that one blemish.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
The point is, there's a difference between saying "Michael Vick should be allowed to play in the NFL, provided any team wants him" and "All references to his arrest, trial and conviction should be purged from the archives"
This guy did some stuff in his past that got him checked out by the feds, and people found out about it. It's up to potential employers to decide whether or not that is relevant to them. I may agree that the past should often just be left as the past, but I don't think that means everyone else has to share my opinion, or be denied the opportunity to form their own. (which is essentially what the OP wants)
Publish a huge volume of information to the internet using your real name so eventually anyone searching for you will only find the good stuff and hopefully will get bored before they find that one blemish.
THAT's why I go for +5 insightful
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.
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 ?
"...you are presumed to be innocent."
In the eyes of the law, sure. Not in the eyes of other people, not if he ended up basically saying "Yeah, I did it." in print somewhere.
True, but social behaviour can - and does - change over time. It is, demonstrably, useful to fight for less-unjust patterns of behaviour - if you've identified one. Is life fair? Obviously not. Can it be made less-unfair, with effort? Yes.
I was not aware people don't have the right to hold whatever opinions they pleased. I don't care if he "paid his debt to society". That means nothing to me, it's a legality about his prison term. You can't force someone to associate with someone they abhor. Michael Vick is a repellent, barely human being and he has a long row to hoe before myself or many others hold him in anything but the basest contempt. I'm not disputing his legal right to work for whomever he can convince to hire him, but I'm also not going to support him or anyone who endorses or supports him either,
Your blog post is not "private". Your memoir in a "text file zine with a small distribuiton list" is not "private".
Sure. We know this now. How many understood it 15 years ago? That it was not only not private, but that it would be available to *everyone*, *forever*? And not just theoretically available, but readily findable?
The internet never forgets. The offending material will always be there. The best thing to do is to bury it. Become an active participant on multiple forums, everything from albacore tuna fishing to zoology (avoid politics and religion). Use your real, full name. Post as much as you can type. In about a year, a search for you will turn up 20 pages of friendly links, most people will stop after page 3. The offending articles will be stale dated and buried at the bottom of the pile. Post to professional forums the most but also non-professional forums so they see that you have a real life as well. You could also try to publish some articles in professional journals (online and dead tree), they should score higher than forum posts. Good Luck.
Morality is herd instinct in the individual. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 116
Keeping in mind that a LOT of people did stupid things when they were younger and never got caught or had their name linked with what they did.
I find that the people who hold onto blame the longest are the same people who were the ones that "Didn't get caught" and they almost feel compelled to point the finger to move attention away from their own activities.
Anyway, sad to say but life's like that... Most people are bigoted to some extent and you can't change that... Move from job to job and prove your worth. Do the opposite to what you were linked with. Give people a reason to believe you've changed and use them as a reference.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Of course he is under no obligation. He is still an asshole for it though.