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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I have a couple of very long running web sites and the #1 request I get is from people to pretty please remove any and all traces of what they were up to a decade ago.

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There's probably money in that. Imagine a service that would allow me to eradicate bits of my past. Could be handy.

There are services that purport to do that, at least on the web. I think the term is 'reputation management'.

The extreme version is known as digital suicide: http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide

Any service that offered to carry out 'digital suicide' would have to be damn sure they had authorization from the person in question. Otherwise it would become digital homocide.

What scares me is sites looking at this as easy money. By that I mean they purposely go out and collect as much info as possible so that you will want to pay to "remove it". Even worse multiple sites doing it so that there is a never ending trail of sites to remove your information. It only takes one to get your info indexed on the major search engines.

Doesn't the Wayback Machine (archive.org) defeat such efforts?

They will also honor take-down requests.

I wonder if we'll ever see the mafia holding such an archive, and asking for payment in exchange for a clean record.

And do you?

Of course. Why wouldn't I?

One possible justification would be it distorts the reality of what actually happened in the past. It alters conversations by removing a speaker, creating a hole.

I'm not judging you one bit. I don't know which sites you were referring to, and you're clearly taking the nice-guy approach. But there are arguable reasons to not remove content just because someone is embarrassed of their past self.

Yes, I am not judging you either, but it could very well be too expensive, technically difficult or perhaps even damaging to your business (for example by reducing the other users' benefit) to remove data. I was just curious.

Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.

> Also I wonder if in the future lawmakers will put mechanisms into place that regulate information and give individuals the right to have their records deleted.

That's already happened in some places.

http://www.jurofoon.nl/nieuws/weblog.asp?id=3039

(Dutch).

The hard part is how do we verify that the records were actually deleted. Is the info still sitting on random backups somewhere. It seems that once it is out there, it will be very hard to put back in the box again. Personally that concerns me.

Yes, that's a real problem. I'd wager that many companies have no idea whatsoever where all the copies of your data have gone.

If someone asks for their account to be removed from a website there are places where you are obliged by law to comply. I live in such a place. But I don't remove their data because I'm obliged by law, but simply because I think that people should own their own creations, and should have the ultimate say over what happens to them, unless they explicitly created something as work for hire and got compensated.

Let's take two different examples: facebook vs HN.

If we're looking at facebook then someone would have a really good case to have their account and all data associated with it removed if they asked for it. In some places that would be legally enforceable.

In the case of HN I think the contributions are woven in to the site so strongly that other peoples stuff would be negatively affected. In such a case I would propose to anonymize the writer.

This avoids the embarrassment but leaves the fabric largely in tact.

I was recently told a very funny story about a guy who works at the C-level for F500 corps. Paying the guy a visit, the usual chit chat, oh what are you doing?

"I'm Google Blasting myself!"

Huh? What the hell is that?

"Well you see, I need to stop having all my online activity appear on page one on Google when people type in my name. So I paid this company to clog Google with a bunch of fake, generated content about me. Hopefully the real information about me which I want to hide from casual searchers will be drowned out in the fake information."

I had never heard of Google Blasting for the common end-user before this, but it's a brilliant idea. And I bet as all of our lives end up being more public through Google, Facebook, Foursquare, etc, the demand for services like Google Blasting will grow. It sounds like a great business idea, though the timing is still wrong, since we're at least a few years from reaching a mass-market demand.

Ultimately, I disagree slightly with Gibson saying We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. Simply because it will be far too easy to spam and blast this form of AI.

True AI in the sense of Wintermute/Neuromancer will happen, inevitably, just not yet. And the day it arrives, Google is instantly dead, a relic of a past era, an antiquated technology we'll all smirk at in history books.

googleblasting.com is free

in case anybody is interested...

What you really want is to have a very common name.

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