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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

#91

Post by nradov »

jfoster wrote: post #25
deertick1 wrote: post #7

Yeah also if you compare results from google vs duckduckgo for controversial search terms like "I don't care about gender identity" Google will return only content that tells you why that opinion is wrong e.g. "why you should care about gender identity" Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search. Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform. Its actually really egregious…

> Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform Reminds me that yesterday I tried googling around the topic of how covid affects fertility (eg. "covid fertility") and nearly every result that comes back is about vaccines not affecting fertility. Okay, thanks Google, but how about the actual disease? Results were a fair bit more relevant by adding "disease" to the query, but still got one or two about…

That's the type of thing that you'll have to search on the specialized Google Scholar site to find useful results.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=COVI...

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

#92

Post by meekmind »

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…

> The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin

Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either.

We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.

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

#93

Post by lozaning »

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?

Because the data is there _forever_ and there's not really anything they can do about it, which stands in stark contrast to how they're used to operating.

There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it.

The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online.

FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.

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

#94

Post by vmception »

majormajor wrote: post #53
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…

> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack. While that sounds like a high price, and you usually don't want to just hire the first person you see advertise a service, the concept of specia…

Agreed, my favorite example of this is how people pay like $100 to get a tax-ID number for their new business, which is free from the IRS and with accidental form choices being consequence free, because they think its fraught with disaster or just too obtuse

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

#96

Post by mike_d »

Rasta1s wrote: post #65
tyingq wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the mugshot sites have adjusted their practices where it's much harder to prove what's really going on. Straight up blackmail payment pages are gone.

Aren't mugshots public records?

Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee.

Mugshots.com was doing exactly this until they got hit with extortion charges: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-websi...

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

#97

Post by slg »

kortilla wrote: post #89
slg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried. This is always stated as a universal truth of the technology, but this mostly seems like a people and organizational problem. We already have encryption algorithms that can encrypt content for dec…

> Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities? Because crypto is implemented in software and it’s trivial to remove the part that encrypts for the government’s key.

You completely ignored the last paragraph of my comment where I addressed this type of concern.

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

#98

Post by throwitaway1235 »

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…

It's simple. The user is a thinking, conscious being, he or she views, what he or she wants. No dilemma. Nothing shall be censored.

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

#99

Post by ChrisKnott »

avianlyric wrote: post #54
slg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 de…

The difference is that strong encryption is an all or nothing proposition. You either have strong encryption that works in all scenarios, both good and ill, or you have weak encryption that protects nothing. There unfortunately is no middle ground, and plenty of people and governments have tried. Selective censorship by central authorities can be granular, choosing to create a legal process for selective censorship d…

It's not all or nothing, at all. The argument is about whether the material can be theoretically legally recovered like Gmail and Facebook Messenger (currently), or not, like WhatsApp. All these services use encryption and are secure.

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

#100

Post by devenblake »

meekmind wrote: post #92
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…

> The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.

> Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either.

Tell that to folks doing web archival.

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