Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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I think maybe it should be binary. If you want to be forgotten, then sure: you don't appear in any search results, period. You don't get to pick and choose what does and doesn't appear.

If someone has published libelous statements about you, there are legal remedies for that. If they're insufficient, those laws should be improved.

Your shit does stay with you forever. As it should. Because it's truth. Crafting your own image by using legal means to remove things you don't like presents you as someone who you are not. I find the thought of doing that to be incredibly unethical.

I've certainly posted things on mailing lists (that are likely still publicly searchable) that I regret. I was younger then, and now I'm maybe, hopefully, a little wiser. I would hope that someone seeing something from me posted in the 90s (for example) would think "oh, he was a teenager then, and he's probably a very different person now". And if not... well, I tend not to care about the opinions of people who lack critical thinking skills.

On human civilization scales, the internet is barely an infant. People aren't used to having such easy access to a variety of things about other people's lives. Once we (as a society) gain more perspective on what that means, we'll be much better equipped to make rational decisions about others based on that body of data. Everyone has things that embarrass them. Only very recently was it so easy for others to find out about a lot of those things.

> I tend not to care about the opinions of people who lack critical thinking skills.

Some of those people might be HR people, divorce judges, immigration officials, dispute arbitrators, loan authorizers, etc etc. It's hard to live off the grid when you have a family.

I do agree that we often can't control the fact that a certain person might be in a position to greatly affect our destiny. And the idea that that person may, as I put it, lack critical thinking skills in a way that really hurts us.

I hesitate to say "that's the price of social progress", because it's very easy to do so when you're not in that situation, but... to some extent I think it is. If you're that worried that your presence on something like the internet could be of great future detriment to your life, then it behooves you to be a lurker, leaving as little trace as you can, and to carefully consider what traces you do decide to leave.

And I guess part of the point I'm trying to make is that these people exist regardless. Maybe you smoked pot all the time in college. In 1970 there wouldn't be an online record of that. In 2014 a careless friend might post a picture of you smoking up. Our hypothetical person who wouldn't hire someone who ever used marijuana still exists regardless of whether or not he knows that you've smoked. 45 years ago you got lucky and there was no way for him to know. Nowadays you either don't engage in behaviors that you think might be objectionable to other people, or you just say screw it, and accept that there may be consequences.

So perhaps the question is whether we need legislation to protect us while the new internet social norms are in their infancy, or is it better to be unprotected, so that the norms change more quickly?

It's a good question, and my opinion is it's better to be mostly unprotected. There might be areas where protections make sense, say, if there's great possibility of physical (and perhaps emotional) harm. But I think these have to be pretty narrow: if it's possible to use these protections to get a negative review of your art suppressed, then it's a bad protection.

> If someone has published libelous statements about you, there are legal remedies for that. If they're insufficient, those laws should be improved.

There are plenty of cases where someone who has a grudge ignores the law and pollutes the search results, and then persistantly ignores attempts to enforce the law. Libel and slander are not criminal offences; the police are never going to get involved and there's no chance of prison.

In that narrowly defined situation it's reasonable for search engines to respond to requests to delist. They need to protect the quality of their search results. When I search for Fred Bloggs I don't want to know what one vexatious person with a vendetta thinks.

I'm not arguing with that. But the interest here is that the search engine wants to provide quality results. The government should not be in the business of deciding what "quality results" means, at least not in the general sense. A government passing a blanket law that allows an artist to suppress honest, legal criticism is a bad law.

While libel is not a criminal offense, if you make it too expensive for someone to commit it, they will stop. Maybe there's an extreme outlier here and there who might bankrupt himself with this sort of behavior, but that's not what the law should be optimizing for.

> ignores attempts to enforce the law

This means that the government is not operating in accordance with its obligation to enforce the law.

This is neither an issue with the law, nor an issue with the concept behind it - posting libelous content causes financial and personal harm, and this harm must be corrected in the civil court of law.

> and this harm must be corrected in the civil court of law.

How?

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