Google introducing tool for under-18s to remove images of them from search

Im not sure it's damning to google as much as to the rest of the internet.

It's indexed by Google; somebody else hosted it publicly

Broad swaths of behavior by the spying tech giants just needs to be outlawed. Discussions about how to mitigate the harm aren't going to fix much. The harmful behavior should be outright banned. "Google and Facebook just have to creepily spy on people, force some workers to look at horrible images, et c., to operate". OK, cool—sounds like they shouldn't operate, then, if that's true.

To privacy or not to privacy is not the question; the question is privacy for whom.

Google indexes the public internet. If its indexed on google it was uploaded, likely by the minor in question not having set their privacy settings on their Facebook.

Google is doing more than they should have to here.

Why is it damning? It’s not obvious to me, apologies.

I am playing devils advocate here, but if you are the solider in Abu Gharaib torture photos, I am not sure you should have a right to purge the internet search of those photos.

So there had to be a middle ground between freedom to find information and an individual's privacy. Do you want Google drawing that line?

Click link, ctrl+f "introduce"

>In the coming weeks, we’ll introduce a new policy that enables anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, to request the removal of their images from Google Image results.

But it just removes photos from image search; AFAICT text search results are unaltered. Perhaps I would no longer see Boris Johnson failing to comb his hair in Google Images but I can still read articles about it and they will still have accompanying photos.

Politicians can already use it with the right-to-be-forgotten-style national policies

> Actual privacy would be proactively removing all images of under 18s from search.

But there are valid reasons for why you would want photographs of u18s in search results (e.g. student athletes, etc)

it's a step away from 100% of people having a bad experience, I will always laud progress today over permanently delayed perfection.

Unfortunately the price you might pay for this is getting locked out of your account. It happened to my brother. One verification step was supposed to be birthday.

Honestly disabling all ad targeting has been the best thing I've done.

> Even for adults, ad targeting based on gender or age (or race) seems… wrong?

Wrong how?

I don't mind ads target based on my gender (e.g. male suits, not cocktail dresses), age (no teenager sneakers), race (probably not interested in Diwali party).

But practically it doesn't matter anyway. The neural network will learn my gender, age and race based on my previous behavior. It will be encoded in trained data, but not explicitly visible. And because of that modern ads developers don't actually need sex, age and race parameters, it won't make targeting better.

Dummy account for YouTube access (or rather, YouTube-dl scraping).

Damn. That’s harsh…

But I can’t argue against your logic.

GDPR in Europe makes a number of provisions for under-18s, including data removal I believe. This is likely an attempt to get ahead of enforcement of those rules by privacy groups.

>> It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers

Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online. Murderers would probably get you or something. Don't want randos knowing you you are. Besides, handles were cooler. Some well known people had publicly known aliases, but aliases were the norm... like on HN.

In my bubble, it was FB that really broke through this. I heard about fb as a social network, but with real names. That way you could friend people from real life. It was actually quite a revelation, like a public address book... very useful.

Anyway... Zuck is, IMO, more of an "eye for the tides" guy than the tide itself. He realised that "relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously" was happening and he decided to be there first.

I agree with you, but just want to politely add that it didn't really sneak up on us, we were warned from the beginning, we just ignored it.

It's like in the story about the frog in the pot of hot water, if someone keeps telling the frog, "you know, that water isn't going to stop getting hotter," and the frog is saying "seems fine to me, I think you worry too much."

We had X-No-Archive: YES throughout the 90s, which thankfully DejaNews honored (up until Google purchased them in 2001, anyways). Search engines are destroying the social fabric of humanity, making it possible for haters to hate with perfect precision. We've been on the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now, and we've earned today's toxic and deadly Internet that resulted from it. Oh well.

Meh, even before 2000 all throughout the 80s and 90s there were white pages (that eventually made it to the Internet) that listed every telephone user's name and address. Talk about creepy! I hated it at the time but AT&T actually charged money (like $5/mo) to keep your name out of the directory so I let it slide.

I wonder why white pages fell out of favor. Maybe the global access made them a bit too invasive, or people voted with their feet. Or switched to mobile phones which did not do this.

Many of us who grew up on or before the web think this has always been creepy and shudder at each new step we take into darkness. Privacy advocates have been screaming into the ether since the beginning, and it hasn't done anything to stop the erosion of privacy.

A huge percentage of society is willing to accept anything Facebook, Google, and Apple throw at them and simply don't care about the present and future ramifications. Some think about it, others enjoy the convenience or think that there's no way it can harm them. Some even drink the cool aid and honestly believe surveillance is good for society.

I fully expect to wind up in a future where we're all starring in our own versions of the Truman Show. Sensors everywhere, constantly streaming our choices and preferences. Our health data, associations, and even thoughts and feelings used against us.

When everyone is watching everything you do, you're no longer free.

Agreed. I don't think people realize that privacy exploitation for profit is really just a negative externality and moves us away further from equilibrium (along with environmental negative externalities where corporation x pollutes more for short term profits but long term ecological degradation)

> by all power structures

Including one of the largest power structures, "users who enjoyed the convenience of finding people."

It would still be less relentless if common individual behavior was to keep personal information private instead of posting everything about yourself on social media.

Two sources of personal information leaks that are difficult to counteract are voter registration and USPS change of address, both of which are publicly available. In the case of voter registration, as soon as I updated my phone number last year, I went from no spam to getting dozens of SMS spam message per day. About 80% of it was political but the other 20% is the standard scam spam. The political spam mostly ended after the election (there's sometimes fund raising pleas) but the scam stuff continues on. The USPS change of address information quickly ends up on all of those "Your Life" type sites. It's frustrating that such basic government functions end up making it easier for others to track and prey on you.

So I am nearly impossible to find. I’m trans and I changed both my legal first and last name when I changed my gender (and the docket was sealed so there is literally no record connecting my current name to my old one). I deleted my social media before I transitioned and I only have LinkedIn. And my new name is too common to easily find me without a few other qualifiers that would require knowing a few things about me (like where I work).

Credit reporting is one thing, but my experience is that they don’t do a great job connecting the dots. I’m still missing my student loans on my credit report, despite having not missed a payment in the last 8 years.

> You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting

Most countries do fine without mandatory surveillance based credit reporting. And banks still gave out loans before credit cards.

> You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence

I don't think this is right, at least not in the context of the parent. Perhaps it's true in regards to _public_ posts on the internet, but I think it's important to consider private photos.

If you upload photos to your private Google Photos account, it will ask you "is this FriendA?" and have you train an image classifier for all your friends. Even if FriendA is not online, as long as FriendB is taking photos of FriendA and tagging them (for example, to make it easier for FriendB to search their photo album) then Google knows how to recognize FriendA.

I have no idea if this training data is used outside of FriendB's library, but I'd assume so.

The newspaper in a town where I went to high school has had an two sentence article up in their archive for 15 years that, in its vagueness, implies I was a drug addict and high school dropout in the 90s when I was 16.

Indeed, that's a very difficult line to draw. In the US we have the concept of a public figure, and I'll admit I have no idea how that's actually defined. That being said I've also wondered if it's too blunt a concept. Are public figures entitled to any privacy, and if so, where is that line? I see celebrities being hounded by paparazzi while trying to go about their daily lives, for example, and while I understand the principles behind why that's legal, I have to imagine it's a real drag.

If somebody is seeking a position of power and/or trust from the public, then the public should get the same information about that person that we'd allow an employer to ask for about a prospective employee. So their qualifications for the job, how they intend to do the job, how they've done in similar jobs before, and how they've handled similar types of trust in the past.

Otherwise, frankly, fuck the public.

I wouldn't say it's the most pressing privacy issue, but we can collectively focus on more than just a single priority. For instance, I wouldn't call someone's medical career useless just because they weren't working on reducing heart disease.

For a long time the first Google result for me was someone from my school posting about work I did. I didn't find their comments particularly complimentary. I wasn't wild about the idea that someone at a prospective employer would probably Google me and see that. I didn't like the idea of harassing the site owner into taking it down, but I will say a big motivator for me in open-source has been flooding the Internet with better reflections of myself to drown out stuff like that. Stuff ends up on the Internet without people's knowledge or express consent all the time. When I joined LinkedIn they already knew a bunch of people I could be connected to. I never gave them that info about my relationships. Other people did! First thing I got was a suggestion to connect with my ex-girlfriend. I hardly think I'm an anomaly with stuff like this.

edit: As another datapoint, I have a coworker who is fanatical about privacy. Will refuse to stand in group photos. Will ask you to delete photos they may appear in if they see you taking one. Gives random names on restaurant orders. No LinkedIn, no social media. I Googled their name: tons of accurate photos, an accurate phone number, school history, etc.

3) Your employer, school, social club, etc. has included you in their organization's public directory, and does not offer the option to opt out, nor do they protect the directory in any way from being indexed / scraped.

There are many ways your photo can be made public that have nothing to do with either of those. For example a company you worked for might publish a photo of you without asking you etc.

What’s more interesting is how inaccurate a lot of this data is. Spokeo for example seems to think I am related to someone because they share a last name and we lived in the same apartment building at some point. Google’s approach of simply collecting third party information simply isn’t reliable.

Or 3) you've ever used a phone, paid a bill, or given your contact information to any business, in which case there will also be several "teaser" results likely containing your name, age, birthdate, current and previous addresses, and phone number hosted by third party services who will happily include more information for $20 or 30 bucks.

The solution to both is actually to have such a common name that you get lost in the noise. If your first + last gives seven digits of google search results, you have to put in some serious SEO work to appear on even the first ten pages, rendering this vector private by default.

> you have opted in to indexing

Most people outside tech won’t know that they’re opting into this or what the consequences could be. Children especially can’t be expected to understand that giving away all that personal data could have serious consequences in their future.

Or you own a house. Property records are public. If you search my name you can find my home address because of this.

Some search engines also index WHOIS data. So if you don't use privacy options then you may be searchable via that too.

You're already arguing that it is desirable to stop this indexation : it's far from obvious, and the question from OP is precisely whether we should try to make it go away or not, not whether it's possible.

I'm not sure it's just lustly pleasure. It might be in the public best interest to know who are these people committing crime. E.g. are they skinheads or hipsters?

In the UK (AFAIK) law enforcement (and probably even newspapers) are not allowed to share photos (or any personal details) until people are prosecuted.

And after people are prosecuted, I wouldn't call prosecuted people "victimized".

Don't know how it works in the US though.