Mugged by a Mug Shot Online
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The site was high on the first page of results for my name and it was extremely frustrating. I'm about to graduate and look for a job and it was embarrassing to think that that's what potential employers would first see. And yet there was nothing I could do about it -- heck, the person wasn't even me.
I'm all for freedom of information and those sites have a perfect right to exist. However, I'm glad that Google also has recognized that their business model doesn't serve the majority of its customers and pushed down the results. After reading the article I checked the results for my name and verified that the offending site disappeared from the first two pages. It may seem like a small thing but I honestly feel more comfortable talking to recruiters now than previously.
Have a jilted ex-lover? Have a pissy neighbor that is upset at you? Well, they can get meaningful revenge on you through this service. Every time someone google's you, they can find out all sorts of hideous things about you that are supposedly true. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Oh, you can subscribe to their corporate service for a LOT of money. I forgot about that. Of course, all it will do is put your RESPONSE to the vile and illegitimate complaints at the top of the page, instead of the bottom. It will still, however, show up on search results and so will the vile bullshit the anonymous person posted about you.
The Ed whateverhisnameis guy behind the site is one of the most disgusting and useless human beings on the planet.
>Asked about a comment alleging another woman had herpes, Magedson responds: “This f—— broad probably did something.”
Edit: And look at the comment section on that article.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/05/09/love-it-or...
All you have to do is make a few interesting things (blog posts, github, etc.) with your name on them and post them to sites like reddit, and they'll easily beat any data-combing reputation smear site.
And you are rather missing the point that 99.9% of people don't have GitHub....
I can only speculate about causes, but I also have someone in another state with my name (even a matching middle initial) on mugshot sites, and the tiniest other references to me (my wedding registry for example) knocked it off the top Google results page immediately.
As for 99.9% of people not having a GitHub account: so what? I was giving a suggestion relevant to a typical HN user, not advice for the general population. The general advice is to do things like that. The point is that if a wedding registry on theknot.com (Hell, I'm not even sure I made that wedding registry; it might have been auto-gen'd from our Amazon registry) can outsell the undesirable sites on Google, you can easily make ten results happen that knock it off.
GitHub just happens to be an exceptionally good one for an HNer, since it's the kind of thing that an employer is likely to actually want to see.
Good job Google.
The first issue is clear, at least to me: this is public information and they have a right to republish it, like it or not.
On the second issue, I don't understand why this is not extortion. Obviously this is because my understanding of what constitutes extortion is faulty. Can any lawyers here explain?
> "Wow - it does seem to come pretty close to the line," Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said upon learning about such sites. "I'd say it skirts the line but may stop just short. (It) depends on how a reasonable person would perceive this in terms of fear."
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/20/net-us-usa-interne...
Pro tip: offering to sell the only copies of a photograph is not a threat to publish.
(Perhaps she wants to sell it to a like-minded buyer, and you're therefore devaluing the property. Too fucking bad, right?)
A problem that I could see the mugshot sites running into is that they imply guilt, when the mugshots were only for arrests. Intentionally misleading someone seems a lot like libel.
I think even many of the most ardent defenders of free press would take exception to a newspaper whose business model consisted of charging people not to write about them. Especially if they provided a bare minimum of factual information and then invited users to "tag" the photo with "suggested" terms like "scary, wtf, wino, beat-up", like one of the websites linked from the article.
1. We already have a court-system that's _suppose_ to be giving out fair punishment for crimes. Adding another "fine"(pay to get mugshots removed) to it I don't think is needed.
2. What happens if I start re-publishing mugshots? And then another person? And then another? How many fees is this person suppose to pay to stop it?
3. More likely than not, the person who's mugshot is online is probably not rich. Probably needs all the money they can get. Having to spend it on getting mugshot-copies removed from online I think is terrible, like kicking someone when they're down.
4. And finally, this is my biggest issue with this by far. It is assumed the person who got arrested actually deserved it. I, personally, have nearly zero faith in the American law enforcement and criminal system. I think it's almost completely corrupt and extremely bias towards certain groups. So the fact that people who've already been unfairly victimized by a broken system, once again having to pay X number of person(s) to get it removed from the internet is just plain unethical.
I always thought the solution was simple - unlike the printed page, web articles don't have to be static. The publishers should allow the subjects of these articles to provide updates to the beat reports (subject to verification of course) to document the disposition of the arrest. You could imagine an article might say "June 1, 2003: Jane Doe arrested for drug positions (insert mugshot/arrest record" followed up "Update Feb 1, 2006: Jane Doe indicated that the case was dismissed, which was verified by court records. Ms. Doe has not been arrested since and documents provided by Ms. Doe (and authenticated by this publication) indicate that she graduated with honors from XX college and has been successfully employed as a mechanical engineer to positive reviews."
That may not help with the extortion racket problem with the mugshot sites, but one would hope that the media outlet websites would rank higher than the mugshot sites on search engines.
Why are mugshots publicized? To intimidate people. It means the police can coerce someone in to doing something with the threat of an arrest.
The NYTimes seems to be blaming private site owners who have added a little SEO juice, whereas county and government websites usually are written so poorly as to barely be crawl-able. The police are the ones publishing these mugshots online, the other sites are just re-organizing them to be a little more Google bot friendly.
You can't just not release the information for the aforementioned reasons. You can disallow rebroadcasting the information - if I can't release it to others, then the police could potentially take the information down after a few days, make you disappear, and then we're back at square one.
I think in this case the danger of misuse by third parties outweighs the danger of police abuse. Maybe there's a better way of keeping the police force accountable?
Second, if the police want to disappear people, they'll just not save that arrest record. The publishing of a log only is only useful for cases where the police decide to "disappear" you after they've arrested and processed the subject. Even then they could release someone, document it, then pick them up around the corner for "disappearing".
For example, what would this website tell me? Potentially, someone with the name of the person (same or not the same) applying for a particular position has had a mug shot. All that tells me is they have been arrested (if it's even the same person), that does not mean they were convicted, they didn't do some minor offense, or they did not as in this case "do their time."
The point is an employer should probably look at confirmed data, if the mugshot is not confirmed, it should really be tossed aside.
Also, you were being creepy.
But not going to lie, we all Google people's names. Still nothing creepy about it.
Now if you're trying a job and they are another 100 applicants....
I was arrested in Miami in November 2003 at the FTAA protest in Miami. Spent a night in jail, and eventually all charges were dropped. Read this if you want more info, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model.
The point is that in my case, I was arrested and I am proud of that. I'll grant that "protestor" sounds more admirable than "had drugs on them". But I think they are similar in some ways.
The first and most obvious similarity is the overly-militarized police force in the US. This is the essence of the Miami Model, a now 10-year old strategy of approaching domestic protest movements militaristicly at the local police level rather than as citizens movements. By applying the same tactics to all law enforcement, we end up with situations of over prosecution for things like possession of drugs and paraphernalia that continue to haunt people for years. For what are minor issues (had a joint or some pills on them, throw em in jail) peoples lives are ruined.
So to the point I want to address is that it doesn't matter, of at least it shouldn't and it's getting better.
Yes, I expect to be Googled and screened when working at a new job. That happened so long ago that no reference really pops up in reference to @geuis (though no doubt it will now) but for me it doesn't matter since it was a protest/civil rights issue that I freely talk about).
But just how the stigma of smoking weed in the past doesn't really matter for jobs that matter anymore, the same thing is increasingly true for other recreational drugs. You did E and acid for a bit? Ok, but what kind of engineer/sales/etc person are you? If anything, I think exposure to certain drugs makes people more valuable because you can't help but learn something from it. I know I did.
My questions would be like, "So I found this and this, can you talk about that a bit?" This is to determine if they are detrimental addicts (no hire) or just recreational/past users.
I'll admit that my vision is blindered because I live in SF, lived in the Miami area, am a liberal, and work in technology. But I count myself as a bell weather of sorts. If the rest of the US is flagging behind in a modern mindset, then eventually they will catch up.
Anyway, I guess I'll wrap this up by saying that if someone has a record or doesn't fit into the ordinary pegs and holes, consider other factors when people look for work. Who knows what things you might have in your own past that you were lucky to avoid being arrested for.
This. For people who are dis-advantage or of the mediocre-middle, these things are much more damaging. A strategy of playing confident in the interview, for example, is worthless if you resume gets auto X'd before anyone reads it or extends you an offer to interview. The audience for this (crap) is HR and BigCo types and other SMEs that are understaffed that outsource hiring to consultuants. Ie, the group of people that will not understand any subtle technical distictions about what makes a good engineer or not, anyway.
Though the mugshot stuff is kind of lame, too. Taking care of it might be as simple as not making the record public unless there's a plea or guilty verdict.
On the second part, sure, they could decide mugshot sites are not eligible for AdWords, but it's not great to have Google deciding who can make advertising money. OTOH, they're already doing this so I suppose they could take some sort of ethical stance here.
Another option they have is to simply set the cost of mug shot related ad clicks higher. Since their pricing determinations are somewhat mysterious, it would be harder to critique them for that. Ultimately, it would probably come down to an ethical stance for them, because they would just be making less money as a result of what I would consider to be a more ethical decision. As it is, they are making money off of a system that appears to be wrecking careers.
if anyone will burn in hell, it will be him.
What do I care whether I have a style violation? Well, it's about using the dark patterns to make your "user page" (collected from publically available information so legally proof) sound as bad as possible. Similar to the consumeraffairs deal where every review is bad. So your prospective employer searches for "Bob Bobson" and sees a nice, professionally designed page that claims:
Bob Bobson has trouble following best practices for code styling, which could indicate a problem with following corporate standards: link to 37 instances of inconsistent naming/indentation/brace style on github
Bob Bobson has 7 github repositories where he has checked in 90% of the source. This may indicate a "lone wolf" that does not play well with others
Bob Bobson has 14 open issues in github trackers. This may indicate lack of following through on a project
Bob Bobson has closed 41 github issues immediately as "wontfix". This may indicate a technologically orientated user that is insensitive to user and customer needs
We've analyzed Bob Bobson's commit messages, and assigned it a English Comprehension Score of 4 (out of 10). This may indicate a communication problem.
Failing anything else, you can smear Bob Bobson by the projects he associates with.
Bob Bobson has contributed to TOR. The TOR tool is associated with child pornographers and drug traffickers.
Bob Bobson has contributed to KDE. The KDE project has 523,123 outstanding bugs. We're not directly saying it's Bob's fault, but you know...
Of course, you can't start off writing all negative smear about everyone. You want to start out by being positive, writing cool blogs about how your company analyzes OSS. Maybe buy some licenses for expensive static analyzers and share the results. Make some cool pages about Linus' or Guido's checkins. Maybe even sponsor a few OSS projects or OSS people.
How does this make money? Well, Bob Bobson does not like to be known as a team player. Would Bob Bobson like to dispel that conclusion based on publically available data in our proprietary algorithms? Well, as it happens we also sell a "TeamWork Evaluation Survey", where if you think your team work skills have improved you under go a comprehensive psychometric test (signed off on by our team of psychometric specialists) that verifies your team work skills. Of course, such a test is expensive, but isn't the $199 worth it to be given a prominent "Team Work: Gold Badge" score? All that other stuff we said about you being a bad team player will go away.
BULLSH*T. Everyone is guilty and Google chooses when to use the hammer for profit or good press. That's how much integrity their results have. Google has known about these sites for ages, yet after NYT writes all of the sudden they are not relevant for users. Total BS.
Also the business of asking MC, VISA and Paypal to terminate services stinks, we saw this with Wikileaks.
Their business is repulsive, personally I'd favor a $5 wrench http://xkcd.com/538/ removal service over this.