Comment by volak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by volak | Hacker News Reader

Entering into a deeper relationship with someone (employer/employee, landlord/tenant, etc) you want to know everything about the other person. This is not because you are some nosy person - its because breaking that relationship means risking lawsuits or damage to your property or a whole eviction process which can take months to years...

Its a dangerous thing to "trust" someone when they'll have that level of control over your future so people use government records and google to know if they could possibly have an issue.

This isn't a privacy issue its a minimizing risk issue.

If you give people better options for minimizing risk then google results will matter less and less. For instance I'd be happy to hire a convict if I could a) pay him less than I normally would (initially) and b) fire him at any time for any reason.

Same for renting. If we draw up a contract with a no-drugs no-weapons clause and allowed me to inspect the place once a month for the first year or so I'd be happy to rent to him.

But these things sensible precautions are illegal. There may be good reasons because of them "evil corporations" blah blah. Sensible or not that's reality - so people understandably discriminate against people based on google results. Its a fairly understandable precaution given the amount of risk involved due to regulation.

Therefore the fix isn't to make google "forget" things - that only increases risk dramatically. The fix is to make these relationships less risky by allowing business owners and landlords more control over their own personal.

So a convicted criminal should be eternally punished by losing any employment security and being paid less than their peers?

That doesn't sound like a society I would like to live in.

The other alternative is that these restrictions would begin with convicted criminals, and spread to the rest of the population. Just because someone hasn't been convicted doesn't mean they aren't a criminal with drugs and weapons in their house after all.

Think you missed the part where I said these restrictions were temporary until trust is rebuilt.

I have more of a reason to trust a stranger with a clean record than I do to trust a convicted criminal. Once the later demonstrates hes trustworthy these restrictions disappear.

In both politics and tech there has been nothing more permanent than a temporary measure. Jail was already supposed to be a temporary punishment for a crime that has been turning into a permanent punishment. How would your system not devolve into the same thing?

How do you handle someone like this guy after he gets out of prison: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/our-tim... If we erase his past from the internet - that kind of enables him to do his scam again immediately. It's a difficult question.

> It's a difficult question.

Not at all. It's up to the legal system and law enforcement to handle this. Not up to citizens, and for good reasons.

And if Google only had to remove links due to a court order, that would be a lot more fair then the current self-censorship regime.

OK, to clarify, I wasn't arguing about whether legal system or citizens should decide but about when people have committed crimes, how much of that history should remain public and for how long is a difficult question for anybody - to balance the public safety and the need to reintegrate someone back into society. The latter because we can't just keep putting people in jail which is the current USA method based on prison overcrowding that we have in the USA, Western European countries have much lighter sentences but the recidivism rates would be interesting to compare.

> law enforcement

At least in my country, law enforcement has no obligation to handle anything. Legal systems punish criminals after-the-fact, it's up to individuals to prevent crimes. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule...

So potential employees should be able to do background checks on their employer so mr smith why did your current HR director leave <REDACTED> when they where in line to become group hr director. Or why did your colleague director X punch the CFO of <REDACTED>

Both real examples from companies I have worked at.

This is a weird question - I think you are trying to point out that the employer/employee relationship is not equal.

This is true. The employer always takes a much greater risk to hire you than you take to work there.

How so? the risk is far worse for the employee than the employer.

Having a bad out come has a greater impact on an individual than say it does to a SME company with 2k employees.

Because in many places employees can't be terminated without cause. You as a business want employees to be worth than what you pay them. If you hire someone for 50k who sits around and needs direction from a manager to do anything you are taking a huge loss. Also as an employee if you are harassing female employees (but never too much because you know how to toe the line) you create an environment no one wants to work with and from which you can't be fired.

An employee being fired is not that difficult. You can either not list the experience on your resume or take the hit and lower you expected salary. You'll never be un-hirable just because you were previously fired.

Sorry that's to be blunt crap I work in the - to your eyes socialist Europe. and I know a fair bit about how employment law works in the UK

And its very easy to fire people for cause - what its harder to do is fire some one for spurious reasons i.e. fired so you can give your nephew the job.

Are you suggesting you are not able to do that?

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