$ youtube-dl -f18 https://9xbud.com/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k
[generic] watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k: Requesting header
[redirect] Following redirect to https://9xbuddy.com/process?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k
[generic] watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k: Requesting header
WARNING: Could not send HEAD request to https://9xbuddy.com/process?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
[generic] watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k: Downloading webpage
WARNING: Falling back on generic information extractor.
[generic] watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k: Extracting information
ERROR: Unsupported URL: https://9xbuddy.com/process?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3k
- Even for adults, ad targeting based on gender or age (or race) seems… wrong?
- Would like them to come out and assume all personalization and recommendation systems they have also waive this for children. E.g.: YouTube recommendations are based solely on similar videos versus profile, location, viewing habits, whatever other magic they probably do.
Is your browsing experience better now? Or you think it makes world a better place?
I like certain ads. For example, I often click of property ads just to learn what they are building in the city I live, what is the price range etc. Because one day I'm going to buy.
Of course I'd prefer no ads, but better this than random junk IMO.
I would argue my browsing experience is better ~ I do enjoy seeing the random junk because that also doesn't make my brain think about "hmm maybe I would like to buy that". Even if I actively avoid thinking about an ad I saw, it still impacts my psyche.
> 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.
Depends on how much data they have on each person but typically adding variables that can be mostly inferred still usually improve model behavior by a little bit overall.
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.
Actually, Google collects MUCH more data (I know that doesn't sound possible) from children under 18.
Open the Family filter and look at what they colect. It is like, everywhere you go, every page you open, every image you look at etc. - Becuase, you know, "think of the kids".
And yes, they may be collecting too much about every one, but this is just another level. And then, for the tiny fraction of kids that opt oout, they have a HUGE data point about them that can be combined with future actions to later build an even more powerful profile.
Considering how many parents I know who post public photos of their children on social media, it’d be great for other services to provide such tools as well.
Possibly controversial proposition, which I offer as a discussion prompt, not necessarily a position: What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously?
Genuinely interested in what folks think about this, pro or con.
Edited to add: The reason I think this question is interesting is because I think it shines a light on some tension between privacy rights and freedom of information.
Looking at the other side of the spectrum, do you think we should still have information available online about prominent people? Politicians, historical figures, etc.?
If so, where do you draw the line between people whose information is useful to the public and people who shouldn't be cataloged?
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.
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.
I haven't checked the exact wording of this definition but, as a summary, "The Supreme Court has defined public figures as those who hold government office and those who have achieved a role of special prominence in the affairs of society by reason of notoriety of their achievements or vigor and success with which they seek public's attention. "
In Germany we draw the line on what type of information the person in question makes public by their own choice. Do you invite tabloids for a home story and let them take pictures? Then other pictures of your home can be published. If you on the other hand never talk about your home and family publicly let alone invite media in, that can remain private. In addition, if the information is relevant to a larger topic (e.g. a corruption scandal involving a politician's home) then you can show anything relevant to that.
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.
While Google does this publicly, there are tons of private indexes doing the same thing for marketing, intelligence and other purposes. As long as people keep posting things online someone will be collecting that info and trying to make money off of it.
We could do this by shifting the bulk of online communication to private/ephemeral spaces. The stuff that wants to be cataloged and searched would just be whatever is left in public. I am pro.
Assuming someone starts covering their online tracks from an early age they can probably largely keep their online presence at a minimum with some caveats.
- You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting
- You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence
- There are certainly situations where many of us have a public presence under our real names. If you ever speak at most conferences for example or publish an article or paper.
When you apply for a loan you have to submit information about previous loans, taxes and payslips. That contains most of the useful information in credit scores anyway.
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.
There are good reasons a lot of things have historically been public records. Some of the reasons look less good on balance when those records can be instantly copied, data mined, and linked to any number of other digital records.
I think one potential solution is to put a small financial barrier in the way of access to a public record. Say it costs a few bucks to view a record (depends on the sensitivity, but maybe $5-10). This won't deter people who are doing records searches for reasonable purposes (lawyers, journalists, curious citizens) since the amount of money to look at a handful of records is basically negligible, but for so-called "people search" websites having to pay $5 per record completely kills the business model.
That's sort of already the case. $25 or so can give you access to a lot more information than you'll get from a casual Google. A lot of this used to be more generally available but I think it's mostly behind paywalls at this point which I don't think is entirely a bad thing.
But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.
My suggestion is to put the financial barrier at the government-industry interface, not at the industry-consumer interface. Right now a lot of brokers slurp up huge amounts of information from freely-available but generally not indexed public government databases (land title registries, voter rolls, etc) and collate them. They then charge fees to consumers for access.
Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.
Without a general right to control data about you, this just makes things worse. Doing this naively means the surveillance companies pay the one time cost of buying the records, and then use/copy/propagate them freely. $5 for everyone in the US is $1.6 billion, which isn't cheap but it's also not out of the scope of how surveillance companies operate. Also the cost just needs to be paid by the industry as a whole rather than each company - data brokers would spend $5 on a record, and then turn around and sell copies of it for $2 ea to 4 different companies. Meanwhile, not being able to see the contents without paying keeps the public's own awareness down.
No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.
I agree that GDPR-style privacy legislation is the ultimate solution, but unfortunately due to the international nature of the internet that sort of legislation will have difficulties until at least (1) the USA passes some sort of GDPR-style federal legislation, and possibly (2) GDPR-style privacy protections become part of international treaties going forward.
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.
Yeah, if the threat model is not wanting a casual Google searcher to look you up and learn things about you, it's probably relatively easy for most people to do--so long as they don't have a job that basically requires them to have their name and face in conference programs, on articles, and the like. Or are otherwise in at least a limited public eye in real life.
That's obviously a lower bar than preventing a determined tracker from learning things about you but it's enough for many people who simply don't want to turn up in a random Google search.
> 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.
I don't think we're actually there yet but it's reasonable to think that, as time goes on, more and more publicly posted photos will be autotagged with the names of people in them.
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.
It wouldn't have been controversial just one generation in the past. For example, prior to the 1990s when this became technically feasible, people would have thought this was downright creepy and would have clamored to ban the practice preemptively.
It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers whose meteoric growth was celebrated by all power structures.
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.
In defence of search engines, when content disappears from the web, it disappears from the search index within months. And robots.txt has been a thing since forever.
But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.
If I ever again post a website, I’m going to post it with basic auth, so that search engines won’t index it to begin with. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills, after all.
Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files.
Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself.
I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look.
> "...the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now..."
that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly.
humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.
Your chosen dichotomy is both common and insufficient, and I am with you in disliking it. The dichotomy I'm considering is threefold instead: Worldwide, Community, and Secret.
This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context.
My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them.
What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.)
ps. I forgot Secrets!
Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.
Except... not. All too often, we see stuff people did or wrote years ago being used against them. Those things may not reflect the person they are today, and that's even worse than "hat[ing] with perfect precision."
That's certainly one view, but it's not my view. If people don't feel safe participating today on some topic that haters have google alerts set up for, then those future archives will be heavily biased in favor of content that's acceptable to the haters of that time. Sounds like a great way to ensure the spread of hate across social generations to me.
Searches will always have the problem of the lack of context. A song or a literary work can mean totally different things if we lack the context or understand the years when they were written.
The second and more serious problem is people thinking that algorithms are so smart that are infallible. This, when a much more sophisticated human brain would have a serious trouble trying to navigate the long lists of random dictionary words that we enter in a browser.
Netizens in general don't understand, or don't care, and just simplify and fill the gaps until they have a caricature that can fit in some "well known stereotype" slot. The result is that our societies are being more and more fractured, radicalized and isolated into different groups.
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."
The frog just sits around in the pot, but we turn the majority of our society into boiling pots; when the frog decides it's too warm after all and jumps out, we have nowhere to go.
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.
>> 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.
> Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online.
In the mid-2000s I was at school, where we were simultaneously being taught (in 'Information and Communication Technology' lessons) never to use a real name online [0], and signing up to Bebo & MySpace with our real names.
It's (there beginning to exist people) growing up with the internet that all but killed that, I'm sure of it.
[0] with some limited web ring/social network type site for schools, for which we given aliases and then, I don't know, wrote BBcode and marquees and stuff about our school-safe interests and hobbies
Definitely pretty much everyone was anonymous on warez boards and the like. On the other hand, a lot of local BBSs actually had something of a local community in real life as well. And the people accessing Usenet from corporate and academic accounts often used their name and affiliation.
The real question is how do we know what tides are coming in the future so we can position ourselves to be ready. Thats where the luck comes into play in my opinion.
I’ve never used my real name online. I still remember my shock when google said you had to use your real name for Google plus (or was it google wave? I can’t remember anymore.) I noped right out of there.
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.
People could look up numbers online if they wanted to, so there was just no need for a big book any longer. They also never had cell numbers so they became less useful in that regard. And most people don't just call a person out of the blue any longer.
I meant more why this kind of directory lost coverage overall as cell phones came in. Maybe it was just really that unpopular to have the name, address & number be public by default.
I don't know the history of why there was never a cellphone directory. There was never a monopoly controlling all those numbers for one thing as was originally the case with landlines--and regional monopolies after the Bell breakup.
I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.
Around that time frame is also when spamming picked up quite a bit, while at the same time early mobile plans rarely had unlimited talk time making the spam particularly costly.
Most people's early mobile plans were very limited, the person receiving the call paid for it in the US, and costs were even higher for calls that weren't from your immediate local area. And, as you say, junk landline calls were becoming a bigger deal.
It was a useful tool. Still would be. Online searches for people are hard now.
But note, those were limited databases. Phone number and address. No birth dates, security numbers, etc.
It was a tool, not a weapon.
We still have a much different attitude toward that kind of data today. If some company leaked all its customers' names, addresses and phone numbers it would be considered a terrible scandal. In the 80s you would be upset if the phone company didn't print out that same data and give it to every customer for free.
That sort of information is regularly bought and sold today. A breach that's just names, addresses, and phone numbers will draw a few headlines, some comments on HN, and a bunch of scolding tweets. But I don't imagine most people see that as particularly sensitive information in most circumstances. (Some exceptions of course such as the fact that you're in a particular database is itself sensitive.)
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)
small counter: that's not what google does. How many times has anyone clicked on the "next page" when it comes to search results? Which is another problem Google refuses to fix: if you're not in the top 10, you're not on the internet as far as the rest of the internet can tell.
It’s only instantly searchable if it’s public. The only place you can’t control this is when family members or friends take pictures and insist on uploading them to Facebook as public pictures, when the implication of not taking a picture/imposing stipulations are negative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously?
This would require a cultural shift away from gossip. But humans love gossip.
If you can't stop gossip, you can't stop someone from saying things they learned about another person, and by extension you can't stop it from being automated neither.
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.
I think by now the problem is more cultural than technical or juridical. I mean many countries have laws in place that would allow for picture removal.
I'm really glad, that my teenage years where before social media and everyone walking around with internet connected cameras on them all the time. All the stupid and embarrassing things I did only live in the memories of the people I was with and it is fun to talk about every now and then.
But when going out these days, there is an almost constant "peer-surveilance" with everyone taking pictures and videos and immediately sharing them online without reflecting whether it is a good idea and just assuming consent of the others. Then when asking people to remove it, the request is often met with bewilderment or mockery why you'd want that. And sure, I could legally go after the person, but that is not really something you'd want to do within a (extended) circle of friends.
I think there are a lot of very cool things that can be done these days that weren't possible in my time. But the complete disrespect of others peoples privacy and their image is really scary to me.
My original take on Google when it another search engines were starting is that it should be illegal for them to scrape businesses without 1) explicit permission and licensing, and that 2) doing so across borders should be governed by treaty.
1 would be easily taken care of because businesses want their stuff indexed, but 2 would be quite something i.e. the ascent of privacy laws.
I'd also like to see this 'tool' made available to anyone. I'm not sure if random photos of people are 'in the public interest', or beyond that if we really get some kind of transcendent value out of all that 'data'. My bet is that most of the power we get from 'sharing' has to do with explicit knowledge i.e. news, research, data APIs etc.
I used to think it was very weird for job applicants in Germany to have to attach a passport-like photo of themselves to their CVs/Resumes… And then! People gladly populate their linked-in and other social media not only with their likenesses but voluntarily offer their opinions attached to such images and real life personae!
I have done everything in my power to keep my kids off the internet. I tell family members not to take photos, I don’t send them through email, I won’t take photos with phones that are cloud connected, etc etc.
The reality is, I walk in and still see a grandma who doesn’t respect the wishes of my wife and I and are adding filters to my kids faces. Now Instagram has their photos. No consent given. I don’t think she posted, but clearly her phone gave Instagram access.
Imo we need laws forbidding image indexing or collection of images. We also need some serious protections around data. The reality is Google, Microsoft, Apple, Chinese communist party, zoom, etc all have too much data and own everyone. Literally, I can’t imagine the government taking any action at all because of their influence.
What does it mean specifically if we "stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously", making it illegal to catalogue all of this information? Imposing a tax? Requiring permission of those involved?
Any child of the Cold War thinks of the "Stasi" as an organization dedicated to cataloging every bit of information about everyone and using it to harm any detractors of the State. Do the same thing and make it publicly available for anyone to harm anyone whatsoever, and you have Google.
> What if we stopped relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously?
It wouldn't eliminate this problem, assuming you consider it a problem. A lot of the images floating around aren't tied to a name. Anyone can save a file and re-use it in some other context.
Because Google estimates that the profit impact of pretending to care about The Children is positive, whereas the profit impact of actually caring about anybody would be negative.
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.
This is neat, maybe if I need data to be removed I can just take a vacation to Europe and fill out the form from there, that makes me protected under EU law for the duration of my stay.
I read and really enjoyed "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden[1]. In it he talked about a time when we didn't use our real names, we'd both change identities and did not expect our identities to be perfectly congruent with our IRL selves. (an element of roleplaying).
I also think that a big part of the problem touches on philosophy, politics, and maybe human nature; Part of the issue isn't that we have something to hide, but that we've allowed people to shame us for things that are ok. We've created a world where the fake is more lauded than the real, and so now people feel pressured to keep up public images that are inhuman.
> "...a time when we didn't use our real names, we'd both change identities and did not expect our identities to be perfectly congruent with our IRL selves."
i've always been struck by the concept of names (formal name, pen name, courtesy name, etc) as alternate identities, which is prominent in the chinese historical/wuxia dramas i guiltily indulge in (e.g., often a character employs a different name, and the other characters all the sudden have no idea who this character is within the reality of the drama).
it seems like the panopticians are encouraging netizens to adopt a similar assortment of names and identities to compartmentalize our public and private lives.
Privacy for your children, as long as parents don't mind jumping through hoops created by google to fix a problem created by google. With I'm sure google-standard support (fuck you if it doesn't work and you aren't friends with a senior employee) to go along for the ride.
It's the appearance of doing something while leaving 99.999% (estimated) of the children's pictures right where they are.
Actual privacy would be proactively removing all images of under 18s from search.
And google could get a written permission from those people before their pictures show up in search. But that would put a huge wrench into the data hoarding business.
>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.
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?
They have already drawn that line, or at least the EU right to be forgotten has. All sorts of results are missing when searching from an EU member state (or the UK).
I'm not sure I agree with it, but we seem we'll past the line already...
That is a difference in the European understanding of punishment and especially redemption. After your punishment was served, what redemption is possible when your acts cannot be forgotten?
The dignity of the human being is untouchable (paragraph 1 of the German constitution). What dignity can you expect when a nude picture of you exist online. Or of a stupid speech you gave. Or of your childhood carneval costume as a Nazi. Or when mug shot of DUI incident is online. Or when your stupid, disgusting, humiliating behavior as a soldier in Iraq is documented everywhere after you served for your war crime.
When you have the concept of redemption in your society, than it needs to be feasible to be redeemed.
Yes I understand that there are extreme examples but it falls in the same category if you consider the dignity of the human being as the most precious thing.
So a consequence, the right to be forgotten exists.
Yeah this is probably why. If this was accessible to you and me, it would be accessible to every ghoul in the public eye. Kids are the only group that can unambiguously be granted unconditional total privacy.
If you are the soldier in Abu Ghraib torture photos, you should be judged by the court of law, not bullied by neighbours and online mob who make mistakes too often.
But it's just an internet search of photos isn't it? You'll still get links to news articles and write-ups and anyone reading about Abu Gharaib tortures will still see these and the accompanying photos. A prospective employer googles your name, it could still come up, just not the photos.
Probably because of GDPR, and similar laws coming into place. You cannot actually automatically hold people under 18 to whatever terms they've consented to on Facebook etc. like you an for adults. You'd actually be required to get their parents consent, which obviously they don't.
The fact this tool even exists is damning to google. "We automatically index and show people pictures of minors. Now we've fixed this by allowing minors to tell us!"
Pick one:
Private by design
Make it easier for strangers to track you with out you knowing
I'm not the guy you're asking but what jumped out to me is that this change creates a database of images of minors and the damning/ironic part is that these are images of people who don't want to be easily searchable to begin with. Imagine the damage if this somehow leaks.
If my wording above sounds convoluted then let me paraphrase: a blacklist is a database too. Google's blacklist will contain assured images of minors because the minors/guardians reported them as such.
Sure it can be hashed/MLed/Bloomfiltered instead of a tabular listing but someone with enough patience and resources can probably make something out of it. (To be honest I don't want to peddle FUD and I'm speaking out of my depth here so I'd be glad to hear an assessment from someone with qualified experience in this area.)
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.
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.
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.
This is an improvement over their previous stance, which was that young people should change their name upon reaching adulthood [1]. This doesn't go far enough though, because just removing photos isn't enough.
Giving minors more control over their digital footprint
Soooo.... Why not give everyone the same control over their digital footprint? Yes, minors are a protects class not being if legal age, but it seems reasonable to allow anyone to opt out things like this.
> We're committed to building products that are secure by default, private by design, and that put people in control.
How can anyone believe this from any of the big tech companies at this point? The only way Google "put[s] people in control" is to let the public do their customer support for them, the only thing private is the details of their CIA connections, and the only thing secure is their market position.
One difficulty with this is the number of teens with social media accounts that have a false age. Most of our friends' kids and many of my nieces and nephews fall into that category, some because they got an account before age 13 and lied, or were older than that and lied to have access to some forums, or just because they just wanted to pretend to be older (my own daughter is an introvert with good sense and isn't on social media). I suspect that Google and Facebook are well aware of this internally.
When you were a kid you had to fake that you are above 18 to get access to something you want, now you have to fake that you are under 18 to get access to something you want…
191 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadSounds like I should adjust the age on my Google profile.
e.g. https://9xbud.com/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2eXs4pCs3... (A video of guys smoking weed)
This actually works for most sites with embedded videos.
- Even for adults, ad targeting based on gender or age (or race) seems… wrong?
- Would like them to come out and assume all personalization and recommendation systems they have also waive this for children. E.g.: YouTube recommendations are based solely on similar videos versus profile, location, viewing habits, whatever other magic they probably do.
I like certain ads. For example, I often click of property ads just to learn what they are building in the city I live, what is the price range etc. Because one day I'm going to buy.
Of course I'd prefer no ads, but better this than random junk IMO.
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.
Open the Family filter and look at what they colect. It is like, everywhere you go, every page you open, every image you look at etc. - Becuase, you know, "think of the kids".
And yes, they may be collecting too much about every one, but this is just another level. And then, for the tiny fraction of kids that opt oout, they have a HUGE data point about them that can be combined with future actions to later build an even more powerful profile.
Genuinely interested in what folks think about this, pro or con.
Edited to add: The reason I think this question is interesting is because I think it shines a light on some tension between privacy rights and freedom of information.
If so, where do you draw the line between people whose information is useful to the public and people who shouldn't be cataloged?
Otherwise, frankly, fuck the public.
I haven't checked the exact wording of this definition but, as a summary, "The Supreme Court has defined public figures as those who hold government office and those who have achieved a role of special prominence in the affairs of society by reason of notoriety of their achievements or vigor and success with which they seek public's attention. "
This will never go away without regulatory intervention. Too much money in it, too much control, and control leads to power.
- You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting
- You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence
- There are certainly situations where many of us have a public presence under our real names. If you ever speak at most conferences for example or publish an article or paper.
Most countries do fine without mandatory surveillance based credit reporting. And banks still gave out loans before credit cards.
But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.
Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.
No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.
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.
That's obviously a lower bar than preventing a determined tracker from learning things about you but it's enough for many people who simply don't want to turn up in a random Google search.
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.
It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers whose meteoric growth was celebrated by all power structures.
But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.
Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files.
Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself.
I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look.
[1] http://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly.
humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.
This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context.
My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them.
What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.)
ps. I forgot Secrets!
Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.
Except... not. All too often, we see stuff people did or wrote years ago being used against them. Those things may not reflect the person they are today, and that's even worse than "hat[ing] with perfect precision."
The second and more serious problem is people thinking that algorithms are so smart that are infallible. This, when a much more sophisticated human brain would have a serious trouble trying to navigate the long lists of random dictionary words that we enter in a browser.
Netizens in general don't understand, or don't care, and just simplify and fill the gaps until they have a caricature that can fit in some "well known stereotype" slot. The result is that our societies are being more and more fractured, radicalized and isolated into different groups.
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."
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.
Including one of the largest power structures, "users who enjoyed the convenience of finding people."
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.
In the mid-2000s I was at school, where we were simultaneously being taught (in 'Information and Communication Technology' lessons) never to use a real name online [0], and signing up to Bebo & MySpace with our real names.
It's (there beginning to exist people) growing up with the internet that all but killed that, I'm sure of it.
[0] with some limited web ring/social network type site for schools, for which we given aliases and then, I don't know, wrote BBcode and marquees and stuff about our school-safe interests and hobbies
Definitely pretty much everyone was anonymous on warez boards and the like. On the other hand, a lot of local BBSs actually had something of a local community in real life as well. And the people accessing Usenet from corporate and academic accounts often used their name and affiliation.
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.
People could look up numbers online if they wanted to, so there was just no need for a big book any longer. They also never had cell numbers so they became less useful in that regard. And most people don't just call a person out of the blue any longer.
I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.
This old article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/06/why-isn-t-there-... claims that the wireless carriers didn't want to put out a directory because consumers would be upset if they had to pay for junk calls.
That sort of information is regularly bought and sold today. A breach that's just names, addresses, and phone numbers will draw a few headlines, some comments on HN, and a bunch of scolding tweets. But I don't imagine most people see that as particularly sensitive information in most circumstances. (Some exceptions of course such as the fact that you're in a particular database is itself sensitive.)
A database feeds more evil than a printed book could, even if scanning/ocr it were feasible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Public indexes is just the surface of the iceberg. And regulating them down would just be more profit for the pay-to-play.
This would require a cultural shift away from gossip. But humans love gossip.
If you can't stop gossip, you can't stop someone from saying things they learned about another person, and by extension you can't stop it from being automated neither.
I'm really glad, that my teenage years where before social media and everyone walking around with internet connected cameras on them all the time. All the stupid and embarrassing things I did only live in the memories of the people I was with and it is fun to talk about every now and then.
But when going out these days, there is an almost constant "peer-surveilance" with everyone taking pictures and videos and immediately sharing them online without reflecting whether it is a good idea and just assuming consent of the others. Then when asking people to remove it, the request is often met with bewilderment or mockery why you'd want that. And sure, I could legally go after the person, but that is not really something you'd want to do within a (extended) circle of friends.
I think there are a lot of very cool things that can be done these days that weren't possible in my time. But the complete disrespect of others peoples privacy and their image is really scary to me.
1 would be easily taken care of because businesses want their stuff indexed, but 2 would be quite something i.e. the ascent of privacy laws.
I'd also like to see this 'tool' made available to anyone. I'm not sure if random photos of people are 'in the public interest', or beyond that if we really get some kind of transcendent value out of all that 'data'. My bet is that most of the power we get from 'sharing' has to do with explicit knowledge i.e. news, research, data APIs etc.
So…
The reality is, I walk in and still see a grandma who doesn’t respect the wishes of my wife and I and are adding filters to my kids faces. Now Instagram has their photos. No consent given. I don’t think she posted, but clearly her phone gave Instagram access.
Imo we need laws forbidding image indexing or collection of images. We also need some serious protections around data. The reality is Google, Microsoft, Apple, Chinese communist party, zoom, etc all have too much data and own everyone. Literally, I can’t imagine the government taking any action at all because of their influence.
So I think we are done, frankly.
Yandex has an index of people's faces. You can search pictures by face.
And China... you know. It is a surveillance nightmare.
It wouldn't eliminate this problem, assuming you consider it a problem. A lot of the images floating around aren't tied to a name. Anyone can save a file and re-use it in some other context.
But I can’t argue against your logic.
are we inherently evil?
Google is asuming we are, thus making this tool in order to "help"
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-reques...
Everyone should have a right to remove data from search. Most data Google indexed without consent.
I read and really enjoyed "Permanent Record" by Edward Snowden[1]. In it he talked about a time when we didn't use our real names, we'd both change identities and did not expect our identities to be perfectly congruent with our IRL selves. (an element of roleplaying).
I also think that a big part of the problem touches on philosophy, politics, and maybe human nature; Part of the issue isn't that we have something to hide, but that we've allowed people to shame us for things that are ok. We've created a world where the fake is more lauded than the real, and so now people feel pressured to keep up public images that are inhuman.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46223297-permanent-recor...
i've always been struck by the concept of names (formal name, pen name, courtesy name, etc) as alternate identities, which is prominent in the chinese historical/wuxia dramas i guiltily indulge in (e.g., often a character employs a different name, and the other characters all the sudden have no idea who this character is within the reality of the drama).
it seems like the panopticians are encouraging netizens to adopt a similar assortment of names and identities to compartmentalize our public and private lives.
Privacy for your children, as long as parents don't mind jumping through hoops created by google to fix a problem created by google. With I'm sure google-standard support (fuck you if it doesn't work and you aren't friends with a senior employee) to go along for the ride.
It's the appearance of doing something while leaving 99.999% (estimated) of the children's pictures right where they are.
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)
So why is tool just for under 18s?
>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.
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?
The dignity of the human being is untouchable (paragraph 1 of the German constitution). What dignity can you expect when a nude picture of you exist online. Or of a stupid speech you gave. Or of your childhood carneval costume as a Nazi. Or when mug shot of DUI incident is online. Or when your stupid, disgusting, humiliating behavior as a soldier in Iraq is documented everywhere after you served for your war crime. When you have the concept of redemption in your society, than it needs to be feasible to be redeemed.
Yes I understand that there are extreme examples but it falls in the same category if you consider the dignity of the human being as the most precious thing.
So a consequence, the right to be forgotten exists.
> Do you want Google drawing that line?
Yes, this is the correct question.
Pick one:
Private by design
Make it easier for strangers to track you with out you knowing
If my wording above sounds convoluted then let me paraphrase: a blacklist is a database too. Google's blacklist will contain assured images of minors because the minors/guardians reported them as such.
Sure it can be hashed/MLed/Bloomfiltered instead of a tabular listing but someone with enough patience and resources can probably make something out of it. (To be honest I don't want to peddle FUD and I'm speaking out of my depth here so I'd be glad to hear an assessment from someone with qualified experience in this area.)
This would be greatly alleviated if everyone was allowed to remove their images in search. I can't help but think it would help https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216733 .
It's indexed by Google; somebody else hosted it publicly
Google is doing more than they should have to here.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-...
Soooo.... Why not give everyone the same control over their digital footprint? Yes, minors are a protects class not being if legal age, but it seems reasonable to allow anyone to opt out things like this.
How can anyone believe this from any of the big tech companies at this point? The only way Google "put[s] people in control" is to let the public do their customer support for them, the only thing private is the details of their CIA connections, and the only thing secure is their market position.