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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

Because this isn't about censorship! Google results are the default answer to 'what something is' online. It's improper for someone's first result online to be fraudulent or irrelevant. So Google is the problem. Not the actual article.

Furthermore, actually removing content from original websites is incredibly hard, incredibly costly, and involves a lot of legal work. Tracing down web hosts all over the planet.

Controlling this at the search engine level, on the other hand, only needs to talk to a handful of companies, and a simple, common framework can ensure individuals are able to expediently request redress for these wrongs against them.

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What if one day everyone runs their own indexer, or there's a distributed search engine where people index parts of the web and share it with others like FreeNet/Kazaa? What of sites like archive.org whose job it is to preserve the history of the web, in effect, a history of our culture?

You're talking about in effect, erecting a Great Firewall around Europe so that EU citizens can't surface information that the rest of the world can. But anyone in Europe could use Tor, a foreign proxy, or a VPN to get around this.

Ultimately, if government censorship extends too far, it may push decentralized information indexing and sharing to be more mainstream than the darknets it currently exists on.

If you'd like to help replace Google with a decentralized, publicly-controlled alternative, I think that'd be a great thing!

But that's a very large amount of mystical speculation, Ray. And by and large, if people had their own indexers, we wouldn't have a single search engine determining what people's public reputation is, so this problem would largely cease to exist.

But the reality is, this has nothing to do with 'government censorship'. Google itself admits things like revenge porn should be blocked. (And in fact, it's Google itself that decides whether or not to censor RTBF sites!) Private citizens should have the right to remove personal information with no public bearing from the Internet. If you disagree, feel free to post your social security number and credit card information.

You can't remove anything from the internet, that's the point, and that's why you should be very careful about what information you put in the internet. At best you can temporarily hide it.

Anyone who truly wants to dig up dirt on you, or wants to do a background check, won't rely only on Google.

You say it's not about a company in particular, but the principle, but notice how you are totally ok with a non-Google index.

The reality is, any distributed system would converge eventually, and end up with the same issues you have with Google today, only just like with controlling nukes in a multipolar, vs superpower world, governments would lose power to regulate speech and publishing. Thinks would get harder and more dangerous for those wishing to remove information about themselves from being found.

Notice how quickly people are to go hyperbolic on the precedent of Apple unlocking a single cell phone, because hey, if the FBI can ask Apple to do it, then the Chinese government can too. But I don't see any similar concern about the possible bad precedents European censorship will set for China, Russia, et al.

How can tech companies put up a fight against Chinese requests for censorship, when the European Union is given that option?

Given your history Jake, of nearly daily anti-Google articles on your social feeds, should I not be skeptical that this has less to do with principle, and more to do with your desire to see Google lose a battle or two?

And before you chalk this up to my employment at Google, maybe you should look at my history in trying to prevent censorship of this form, going all the way back to the 90s as one of the authors of the early anonymizing internet proxies in 1996 (https://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/privacy-compcon97-ww..., search for 'Decense', or https://web.archive.org/web/20011129060515/http://www.clark....)

I have always absolutely opposed censorship, of any kind, by any entity.

The problem is other people can (and do) put private information about you on the Internet. I am not any more comfortable with a Bing index than a Google index, Ray. Decentralized search, not controlled by a corporation, however, has very different ethics.

The problem is, that for example, right now, your employer could choose the next US President. Google Search has that power. Furthermore, Eric Schmidt is literally working for the Clinton campaign. I don't know how you could fail to see the difference between a decentralized, neutral search index (or at least one that didn't keep it's search algorithms veiled in secrecy) and your employer's completely non-transparent black box with the power to write history.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-co...

Google (and Bing or any other search provider) decides through a mysterious algorithm how to rank people's lives. A faceless algorithm can determine whether someone can EVER HOLD A JOB AGAIN. Seriously? You're going to defend that? I know Googlers believe that automation is somewhere close to godliness, but the fact of the matter is, Google ruins lives. And Google doesn't even have the decency to entertain a request for redress without a government passing a law to mandate they do so.

If Google had a customer service team of people that treated people like people, maybe this sort of thing would never have become a problem. And yeah, if Microsoft or Apple had the level of sheer unchecked power coupled with inane irresponsibility that Google has, I'd be up in arms about them too.

And I still feel if you think it's wrong for people to have the right to retract their personal information from the Internet, your social security number should be on it.

It doesn't matter if the algorithm is known, or unknown in a distributed index, the fact is, any ranking algorithm will be vulnerable to poisoning attacks.

Let's say you have a completely distributed search index with no ability for a central authority to curate. An attacker wanting to sway the US election would simply flood the internet with fake sites and link farms, designed to attack the weaknesses in a publicly known algorithm. This is in fact, substantially more likely than Google modifying their own system to favor a candidate.

What this basically means is he who has the most compute resources wins. Powerful entities could still manipulate the result just as anyone who owns more than 50% of the hashing power in the blockchain can dictate it. Dedicated campaigns can do it too (Santorum anyone?) Any coalition or entity with greater resources than the opposition will have an outsized voice.

You're positing a decentralized system absolutely immune from collision or resource constraints, in all likelihood, the systems deployed would have huge compromises that can be manipulated as easy as a Google Bomb, only with less ability to mount a defense. That is, an open index and known algorithm would likely be WORSE at defense against manipulation.

One only needs to look at how long it took to develop defenses to spam on USENET/UUCP/NNTP and SMTP. Even today, the defenses are not perfect, and that's after 20 years of sophisticated development.

The reality is, if you commit a crime that's in the public record, if you're a felon, or had judgements against you, and your employer is going to discriminate against you, then they will find the information. How the hell do you think this worked before Google? You think background checks for job candidates only started when Google launched? The government, marriage, police, and civil court case databases are all public. If I want to find out if you're a criminal or a cheat, I don't need Google.

Your argument that I should 'dox' myself if I feel people shouldn't have a right to retract information from the internet doesn't make any sense. It's precisely because I don't believe you can ever retract such information that I don't post my sex tapes with Kim Kardashian. If I knew I could censor whatever I want, then I'd feel free to dump all kinds of information I don't want to get out.

If someone decides to spread your info on the internet, censoring Google won't save you. People taking revenge carpet bomb information all over many resources like Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Wikipedia. Ask the women harassed in the GamerGate fiasco if the biggest issue was Google searches, or social network spam. Have you not seen Encyclopedia Dramatica?

IMHO, if you want to deal with discrimination over knowledge of your public records, pass anti-discrimination laws. Don't rely on security-through-obscurity. If you're living a lie, sooner or later your workplace will find out.

You seem to be assuming everyone is using and contributing to a single index, or that everyone's using the same ranking algorithm. Both are problematic.

Yes, you can file checks with government agencies or what-have-you, the problem is Google isn't a government agency. Google is the court of Google. You don't even have to be guilty to be sentenced for life by it.

Ray, I've never met you, but if I claim that you've molested a child or something, there's a possibility, depending where that's said, that it becomes attached to your name in search results. Even with no official court record, evidence, etc. your name may be permanently tainted.

Your unwillingness to dox yourself is a problem because for millions of people every year, it's not a choice. Let's say I have your social security number, and I post it online. As far as your viewpoint is concerned, (you can't remove anything from the Internet), your identity is permanently compromised, for life. What would you do if that happened, what would be your first step? You're suggesting it's okay that crimes against you involving your personal information should be permanent and irrevocable.

Privacy IS security-through-obscurity. Time and time again, I've seen that Googlers fail to grasp that concept. Privacy = obscurity. And if you are opposed to obscurity, than you're similarly opposed to privacy.

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