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Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

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Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#41

Post by dkokelley »

kypro wrote: post #31
dkokelley wrote: post #19

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

IMO both of these options are terrible. I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take. What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exi…

I appreciate this response! I agree that a legal process seems to be the best solution (so far) to collectively deciding what is and isn't ok.

The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain?

Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#42

Post by Dracophoenix »

kypro wrote: post #31
dkokelley wrote: post #19

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

IMO both of these options are terrible. I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take. What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exi…

It's not just companies. It's differing jurisdictions. The Middle East would hold that promoting homosexuality is "harmful" (not unlike the US even a few years into the 21st century). China would hold that it is harmful to promote a different political party than the CCP. India finds it harmful for people to kiss in public. There is no legal process that discerns "truly harmful" material from that which is perceived. Harm or lack thereof is limited to individual assessment

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#43

Post by slg »

kypro wrote: post #31
dkokelley wrote: post #19

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

IMO both of these options are terrible. I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take. What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exi…

>I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take.

>What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.

What is interesting is that I wouldn't even have to change a single word here and I can equally apply this reasoning to encryption. It is almost always unpopular on HN to suggest that universal end-to-end encryption might not be a great idea or that encryption backdoors are something that need to be seriously discussed, but those opinions are born out of the same underlying logic.

Free speech is good, but no society wants universal free speech since there are legitimately evil people who will use their speech for malicious means. Same is true about encryption. Why are we ok with removing revenge porn from Google results but need to just accept that we are allowing child porn to be shared via easily encrypted channels?

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#44

Post by oh_sigh »

legitster wrote: post #21

To Google's credit, it's literally the first search results for "how do I remove myself from Google". It is a bit ironic that people looking to remove something for being too easy to find via search are being stymied by a simple search. Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.

First result...under 4 ads that probably make you pay to do the thing google does for free for you.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#45

Post by gninazol »

CDRdude wrote: post #37
lozaning wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I freaked a bunch of FBI agents out a while back by Base64 encoding a photo of an FBI logo and writing that to the Eth chain. They have massive concerns around this regarding data exfiltration. The cost of removing the data, once written to a chain, is essentially equal to the market cap of the coin for that chain.

I don’t understand. Why did this freak out a bunch of FBI agents?

Are you asking why it freaked out real FBI agents or the ones in lozaning's imagination?

The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is.

For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration".

I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#46

Post by summerlight »

ipaddr wrote: post #36
dkokelley wrote: post #19

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

You don't undo a harm by trying to erase it. If the porn has been created/recorded the ex has a copy and could upload it to non-block chain locations. Once he shares it it has been decentralized. There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.

But still you can try making it harder to access by cutting the major distribution channels, which perhaps will significantly reduce its propagation velocity. With whatever technologies that refuse to fix this issue, you cannot. This is a critical difference for law enforcement.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#47

Post by gninazol »

dkokelley wrote: post #19

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

Always good to rehash the same exact conversation over and over for ... 13 years now. Can we at least pretend to learn something from every other time this exact conversation has played out?

No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#48

Post by danso »

deertick1 wrote: post #34
brunoTbear wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ask if that error might be better understood as downranking of two things that seem very reasonable to downrank in a search engine (something designed to return accessible and useful information): - bigots motivated by animosity towards minorities - open contempt for the truth Hard to feel there's a compelling interest in supporting bigotry when knowledge is best advanced by open inquiry and the net result of big…

Yeah so thats the thing. You are just immediately assuming that you are right and everyone who disagrees is wrong and a horrible person. Personally, I see people obsessed with gender identity as being wrong, anti-truth, anti science, disingenuous, etc. So thats my point : I don't want google to give me the truth, I want it to give me the internet, warts and all. I don't want google to gatekeep the information I have…

Why did you start using Google in the first place? Their early papers on PageRank/BackRub describes how their algorithm filters for quality, and their most prominent example is explicitly political:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

> As an example which illustrates the use of PageRank, anchor text, and proximity, Figure 4 shows Google's results for a search on "bill clinton". These results demonstrates some of Google's features. The results are clustered by server. This helps considerably when sifting through result sets. A number of results are from the whitehouse.gov domain which is what one may reasonably expect from such a search. Currently, most major commercial search engines do not return any results from whitehouse.gov, much less the right ones.

> ...The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#49

Post by judge2020 »

danso wrote: post #2

Couldn't fit the whole tweet, so just to be clear, she's talking about manual, non-legal requests: > One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?... Down the thread, she adds…

This might also include what is required to comply with GDPR’s right to be forgotten, if that’s still a thing.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#50

Post by jfrunyon »

oh_sigh wrote: post #44
legitster wrote: post #21

To Google's credit, it's literally the first search results for "how do I remove myself from Google". It is a bit ironic that people looking to remove something for being too easy to find via search are being stymied by a simple search. Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.

First result...under 4 ads that probably make you pay to do the thing google does for free for you.

I get 0 ads on that search. The very first result, above anything but their header, is https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061 .
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