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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?
...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?
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'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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
I'd speak to your Doctor. I imagine you can get a prescription that will be covered by your insurance. Way easier than 'a friend of a friend' trying to find illegal ways of getting it under your name.
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.
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
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
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 ?
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.
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
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