Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
2. Drown out the old stuff. Develop an online presence that will bury the old stuff into obscurity. Register your real name as your user ID on all the sites you post on. Downside: prospective employers, etc, will think you spend all day on those sites.
3. Change your name.
Sorry if this is of no help.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
...posting the fact to a site where a good deal of the readership's instinctive reaction to the posting of sensitive information on the Internet is to find and mirror it in as many locations as possible is probably not the best first step. See "Streisand Effect". Then again, if you are just pretending to be the subject of the text in order to humiliate the actual victim even further, then I tip my hat to you sir. Bravo!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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?
There is no way you can track down all those bits and alter/destroy them. Regardless fo the legality, it is impossible from a legal perspective.
Go Buddhist, give up everything, change your name, (your SSN will stay, IIRC) and reinvent yourself. Seems to me to be a lot for a stupid text file. As someone who would work at a summer camp, I would disappear 3 months out of the year to the world outside the camp. I'd come back fresh, refreshed and unencumbered. Live off the net for a while and see how really irrelevant it is to the Real World.
or just maybe remove all the link destinations?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Just hack into the server hosting the offending item and... oh wait.
First[1], you need to invent a time machine. Then you travel back in time and either convince your former self not to do it or you kill all the witnesses and destroy all the evidence.
[1] You can actually do it last, if you like. Or in the middle. Whenever. It is a time machine, after[2] all.
[2] Or before all. It is a time machine, after[3] all.
[3] Or before all. It is stack overflow near line 5. Bailing
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I bought a used street sweeper and modded it with an extra tank on the top. I fill that full of white-out that I made myself in bulk from a secret family recipe (what can I say, I come from a long line of screw-ups). Then whenever I put my online foot in my mouth, I run out and hop in my "Eraser" and head off for my ISP's local datacenter... I whitewash the whole place top to bottom, and problem solved.
I'm a long-term Rocky Horror Picture Show cast member, and I run a web site for our local cast in Austin. I've been running this web site for over a decade now.
Cast members are frequently very interested to see photographs of themselves performing in the show. And since it's Rocky Horror, they're usually wearing lingerie of some sort. At the time the photos are posted, they're invariably very excited about this. Especially because I take pride in my photography, and most people haven't seen photos of themselves prior to this that someone had actually put significant work into.
A few years later though, these same people have frequently quit the cast, possibly graduated from college, and moved on to other activities. They may decide they want to apply for jobs in education, as music minister of a church, etc. They do some vanity searching on Google and are shocked... shocked I tell you!... that the Rocky Horror cast web site is still online and kicking with what had been posted some years previously.
Now keep in mind this is a hobby web site that I do purely for the enjoyment of myself and other cast members. It's done in my spare time, and I've always paid for it out of pocket.
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. I get probably a half dozen requests per year on average at this point all basically saying the same thing: "Take down my photos now! You're causing damage to my reputation!". At some point I just had to say to hell with them all and whip up a form letter response saying "Sorry, but I'm just not going to do anything about it".
In fact, it bugs me nearly every day:
A few years ago I was living in a place for just a few weeks and using the computer that came with the room there. Unfortunately, I apparently left my browser with the cookie or whatever that automatically logged me into gmail account. So, some asshole came along after I left and used the opportunity to use my email account to register for some forum that discusses getting Viagra in all kinds of illegal ways. My gmail address is basically exactly my name.
So every time I apply for a job, every time I apply for an apartment or whatever, when I meet a girl etc, I feel like someone's going to Google me and nearly the first result that pops up is all this crap about all kinds of illegal ways of getting Viagra for recreation use etc. It's a nightmare. I've done everything I can to email administrators of the forum (which has now seemed to be swallowed up into other forums so the same posts appear on several different sites) but no one ever returns my emails no matter how much I explain the situation. Due to the nature of my work, I'm very confident this has in fact impacted my career. I don't want to think about things like potential girlfriends, housemates, people generally interested in what I've done in the (scientific) community I work in, etc.
If anyone has any ideas for me on what I could do it would be IMMENSELY valuable to me. I'm very glad this has come up on Slashdot.
I've seen first-hand at two companies that he's got something to worry about. Not during the interview, but before. At my last two employers it was standard process to do a quick google/facebook check and discard any applicants showing anything remotely controversial as part of their public persona. When you get 500+ resumes for one position, you do everything you can to whittle that stack down BEFORE you start bringing people in for interviews.
I'm not saying I agree with any of it, just relaying my bit of anecdotal evidence.
Yep, that bad ass hacks calculators! Do you know the turmail he could have caused! He should have been sent away for a very very long time!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
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?
After that you can right a memoir and appear on talk shows. You won't need another job.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
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.
Join Scientology. Then claim the files were posted online as a falsified attack by somebody that disagrees with your religious beliefs. The web site will be shut down in no time.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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
No, just explain and they will typically understand. For example, my minor youporn issue was ignored by my current employer once I demonstrated that the whole goat thing was a result of misleading camera angles.
The problem is that others have taken it upon themselves to take responsibility for him. Or rather, not to take responsibility for him.
Bottom line, if an employer was willing to dismiss you based hearsay(which this effectively is), or even a verified incident in your past that resulted in no charges, then you are better off not working for that employer. Find yourself a job in a small to medium business without HR drones, where you can actually shake hands with the boss during the interview and even have an opportunity to bring up the incident if you feel it would concern them. Even at half the pay, it'll be twice the job. That's how you find employment.
If you're only sending by-the-numbers CVs to faceless companies, expect a by-the-numbers response.
May the Maths Be with you!
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?
Maybe the unspoken criterion for hiring is "smart enough to not get caught". If you need dirty deeds done dirt cheap, you need people who won't get busted and implicate you in the process.
Certainly, you don't need someone who treats a member of the 4th Estate as a personal confessor. (Yes, if you knew you were discussing your shady past with an internet publisher*, you shouldn't be the tiniest bit surprised that it got out there for anyone who can use Google to find.)
*Yes, an editor for a "a text file zine with a small distribution list" is an internet publisher. Deal with the new reality. Nothing is "small distribution" as long as scrapers, crawlers, and aggregators can find it.
Your Facebook page is not "private". Your blog post is not "private". Your memoir in a "text file zine with a small distribuiton list" is not "private".
"Private" means "we never talk about this with anyone who won't keep it quiet."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Here is the offending file on textfiles.com:
I found it by doing a search on google for "site:textfiles.com university computer system" and it came up as the first match
The Anarchives
In early march of 1995 I was arrested for "Unauthorized Use Of A Computer". (About 15 years ago)
I was being accused of breaking into the computer systems at the University Of Toronto for the purpose of publishing "Anarchist newsletters".
---------------
Doing a little bit more research shows that Jesse Hirsh is also a contributor to Slash Code:
http://www.slashcode.com/docs/AUTHORS
but is it legal to deny someone a job opportunity based on an alleged crime for which they were completely pardoned?
Uhh, yes. There is no "right" to a job in the USA. You can be denied for ANY reason except race, religon, or sexual orientation and those are hard to prove.
Why in the world would you think any employer "must" hire someone? Are you kidding me? The USA is a hire and fire at-will country and always has been. It doesn't even make sense to consider whether an employer "must" hire someone they don't want to hire because any employer in their right mind would simply eliminate the position before they would hire someone who is forced upon them. This isn't France.
I kinda-sorta give you a pass because it appears you are Non-US. I'd only point out that this distinction is one major difference between the USA and the rest of the world. There is no right to a job in the USA at all.
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
More seriously: make sure you're okay with yourself if you do decide to appear on certain guitar in the shower websites. You never know which xkcd reading coworkers will say "hey, didn't you appear on..." and be correct.
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
Create multiple websites about you. In one, you were a beer-drinking guy who moved to the Barbados. Not you.
In another, you authored multiple books and magazine columns. Might be you.
A few more randomly generated ones and some near-look-alikes and you're done. They won't know what to believe. Oh and set a tracker on the websites, so you can see which ones your prospective employer visited (ID them by their IP)
I Albert Walter from Wisconsin, did something similar as you, several years ago, i stole private information from my company (Software Systems, Inc). I, however, didn't make your mistake, i never told anyone or claimed to do it on the internet, because i knew i would be doomed if i did that.
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.
Anyone who tells you that life is fair is an idiot. "Should" has very little to do with what people actually do. And if you think you can change that, you're deluding yourself.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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.
In most years, if an employer turned me down for something like that, I'd laugh it off. I get leads all the time. Then again...
The most common thread I've observed as a long term consultant is that every company out there thinks that their team needs to be "extremely elite" because their product is "extremely important" and therefore their employees need to be "perfect". Every team I've worked with seems to beat their chests with that stuff, mainly because they're so out of touch with the rest of the industry that they don't realize that their little b2b app is run of the mill, that their development team isn't any more skilled than the last team you worked with, and that their management isn't any smarter and their work environment isn't any better than anyone else. When there's a down economy, every company out there thinks they're the best because so many people apply for jobs with them.
My advice to anyone who's turned down for a job in general is to ask as many questions as you can about WHY you were turned down. They'll usually be hesitant to give you any info about it, but they're technically supposed to give you at least a general reason. If you at least know why you're not getting work, you can take that and go after someone who's got something on you up on the net. Asking politely doesn't work, you've got to have your lawyer call that guy to make something like that happen. Asking those questions saved my career...I was beating my head against the wall a couple years back trying to get a job, only to find out that one of my references who told me he would give me a reference, wasn't actually allowed to give them out. I asked every recruiter I had contacted until I found out which reference was screwing me out of work.
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.
But the poster has not matured. We know this because this mental child asks the question "How do I hide the shit I have done?".
That's quite a leap you just made there, judging a guy's mental state from one paragraph. It is not necessarily "immature" to wish to stop being punished. Heck, my Mom still holds a grudge against me for absent-mindedly leaving three 1/2 gallons of ice cream on the counter to melt -- 25 years ago. Am I immature for wishing she'd let that go? Am I still unable to properly store perishable foodstuffs? I assume you know. But this guy's case is quite different, you say? Please, share the details.
I am not a crackpot.
Did you rape and murder my sister while burglarizing her house 15 years ago?
Isn't it interesting that you're the only one asking that question? Why hasn't he responded to your question yet? Perhaps he has something to hide.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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
Then you'll want to unplug the phone line from your modem. That way nobody can access your internet. Problem solved!
I was beating my head against the wall a couple years back trying to get a job, only to find out that one of my references who told me he would give me a reference, wasn't actually allowed to give them out. I asked every recruiter I had contacted until I found out which reference was screwing me out of work.
Or you can just have a buddy call your references and let you know what they said. That's what I do.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
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?
..register more than 600 Slashdot accounts, keep using them until you get Moderator ability, then downvote EVERYTHING here to -1 as to not draw more attention to yourself online.
If these people "Didn't get caught" how would you know of said activities?
"Didn't get caught" means that nobody in authority was able to pin blame on them for it. This doesn't mean that they didn't brag about it to anyone and everyone in their peer groups (or even outside of them). "Didn't get caught" and "everyone knows" aren't mutually exclusive.
Of course he is under no obligation. He is still an asshole for it though.
Don't ask why you didn't get the job, as that will make the other person defensive. People usually clam up when they feel threatened in some way. Ask for recommendations as to what you could do better as you continue your job search. Most people like to help, especially when someone comes to them for advice or expertise. You'd be amazed at how much more information you get using this approach, even though you are essentially asking the same question.
Only if race, religion, national origin, and (depending on your locale) sexual orientation are part of that opinion.
Thinking of him as a low-life dirtbag who killed animals for his personal jollies and then not hiring him based on that is still perfectly legal.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Perhaps he has something to hide.
His nuts.