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Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

I don't actually think having hits for your name through google is the most pressing privacy issue we face today. if I can find you by searching your name, one of two things is likely true: 1) you have opted in to indexing by having a public facebook, linkedin, etc., or 2) your name has appeared in a news article. the solution to 1) is pretty simple; don't have public profiles with your real name if you don't want to be indexed. 2) is a more subtle issue, but is more of an issue with news articles than google.

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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.

This is missing the point though. Let's focus on #1 from above; most people who post things online probably want Google to index them and even do SEO tricks to get there. I post stuff about myself on my website because I want people to see it.

The issue comes when I put stuff on my website about someone else, as in your example. I want my content to be on Google, but you want my content off of Google. At that point, there's a conflict and it's not clear to me who should be resolving it and what position Google should take.

The options are:

1. No one gets to be indexed, which will hurt the millions who want people to discover their content

2. Google has to manually decide in every single instance like the one you mention in your post, that seems unrealistic

3. The status quo, which is that Google indexes what's posted publicly.

Or a 4th option: if, as you say, most people are doing SEO tricks to get there, why not just only index stuff that has indexing-specific metadata associated with it. I don't see why this needs to be so different from an opt-in version of robots.txt. IMO this only becomes unclear when you're collecting user content en masse from non-technical users, say in a case like Facebook, etc. And IMO Facebook just shouldn't be passing on user-content from individual consumers to be indexed, especially if they encourage you to upload data that references other people.

That doesn't solve the majority of issues brought up here. Just like it wouldn't solve all the things you mentioned about your colleague posting things you aren't happy about.

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.

I think that can be addressed as a more general case of 2). I'm not necessarily saying it's okay that you end up in google's results because your name appeared in some random news article or because your alma mater has a public, scrapeable directory. I'm saying that the responsibility lies with the entity that originally makes the info public, even if that doesn't leave us with a single entity that's easy to pressure.

google ought to respond to reasonable requests to delist, but I don't think it's reasonable for it to guarantee that certain types of information never get indexed.

I'm not buying it. The problem is something being public and easily searchable. One of these things came before the other. It's totally Google's responsibility and a problem with Google (or, more generally, information aggregators), not these things that existed for literally hundreds of years before companies like Google came along.

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.

So should Google be the moderator of the entire WWW and resolve every single dispute on any websites posting information about someone who doesn't want their information there? Or should no one ever have their website searchable because a small handful of websites post content which 100% of the people in the content don't agree with? And what if I post about someone who assaulted me, and the criminal wants my content off my website? These are not easy problems and "let's throw it all out" doesn't seem like a solution.

Publishing accurate information is already difficult and their trying to automated it. Having Google post your information is concerning, having them potentially confuse the victim with the perpetrators is a whole other issue.

Which isn’t a problem for Google because their standards seem to be good enough to target advertising, but it is a problem for everyone else.

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.

Personally, someone with my name won a Pullitzer, so I'm never going to be on the top page.

Even name + (previous) employers barely finds me, because it's all about using those employers' services in relation to the books. Name + location is about book signings.

The only downside is when my namesake was interviewed on the radio and a) I kind of freaked out a bit when they said Terry Gross was going to talk to me later in the day, and I was totally unprepared, b) it was really weird listening to her introduce me incorrectly, I didn't grow up where she said or anything. Also, people send me pictures of 'my' books when they see them, which is a lot.

I love the relative anonyminity though.

> 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.

maybe true ten years ago, but I really feel that you would have been living under a rock to not understand that at this point.

take linkedin for example. what could possibly be the point of making a linkedin account other than to have people you don't/barely know message you about jobs, or vice versa? or look at how people use instagram. the whole point of using the platform seems (to me) to be to accumulate as many follows as possible.

I do think there's at least an argument to be made about reasonable defaults. unless it's overwhelmingly clear that a person would want their profile to be public, it should be private by default. perhaps private should be the only option for minors.

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.

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

Most registrars have started to hide the real info because of GDPR. I live outside of EU, but my registrar stopped showing my name and address in WHOIS queries without having to opt into their privacy options.

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