[jalanco]

Reading this made me think about the hard problem of "removing" yourself from the internet. I don't think it is possible. But I do think there might be an opportunity for a service that creates so much conflicting and false information about a person that it is not possible to know the truth about them: false addresses, phone numbers, credit histories, you name it. Just a thought.

[njharman]

Having lots of false information is (very) worse in many cases. People don't know it's false and will assume it is true and about you. So, for instance if this "False info Service" created an account (probably several) on AM, you'd probably be unhappy now. Or posts on some nasty 4Chan that prospective employers find. Or puts up false past address that happened to be the real address of sex offender and now your name shows up next to it on OMFGAMCGTBR.com. Or uses alias of some known criminal and a prosecutor subpoenas "False info Service" to find the real name/address of this criminal, you.

The only ways to not be embarrassed by what is online about you are. [And I understand embarrassment is not the only reason to be anonymous, but if people are honest with themselves it is 90% of the reason they care.]

1. don't give a shit / don't be embarrassed / don't live by other's standards or norms (this seems easiest to me but I'm sort of anti-social amoral and have not been giving a shit what others values as they apply to me from a young age, YMMV)

2. Don't do embarrassing things. Sort of corollary of #1 (as in the less you are embarrassed by the easier it is to not to embarrassing things.

3. Don't live in modern society. Get born some place with no electricity and kill (optionally eat) all the scientist who come to study/photograph you.

[bnycum]

To further go with this, I have a simple email I scored when gmail first opened. Basically it's a single name with no extra characters. Anyways tons of people sign up for things under that email, and that email is of course in the Ashley Madison leak. It's also part of a ton of other leaks but it's never me. Someone even has a facebook account under it that they won't let me delete. People have used it for AT&T, Verizon, AllState, Honda. Hell even FarmersOnly.com.

I had to stop using that email because of all this over the years. It's unfortunate but this email address is tied to me, I've tried to erase my name from it as much as I can on the Internet tying it to me over the years.

Mostly I just laugh it off, it's annoying. At least my wife knows I wouldn't be on farmersonly.com.

[whopa]

Yeah, I have a [e-mail] address which is full of misdirected email. I don't use it either, though it is my default throwaway email for access walls (enter your email to read this article!) and the like. Someone opened a facebook account with it, an instagram account with it, etc.

I get cell phone bills which you can't unsubscribe from, since the auth is actually tied to the phone. I get tons of email newsletters. For a good chunk of them the unsubscribe flow doesn't actually work, so I wind up marking them as spam.

Apparently people signing up to gmail with bogus secondary recovery account emails that Google has a whole flow for "disavow this email from your account". I wind up using that flow 2-3 times a week.

The concept of email is hard I guess.

[merpnderp]

I thought facebook sent a confirmation email to the address. How are people getting around that requirement?

[notahacker]

I have an gmail account with an initial and a very uncommon surname, and even I get regular updates on a lady's food deliveries.

If ever a potentially relationship-breaking revelation was plausibly deniable, it's this one.

[VLM]

You're assuming the false data has to be some kind of "white noise composite" of all internet content, including the bad stuff.

I would think it would be trivial to collect relatively innocent concepts and flood the net with them. Such that the nym "VLM" would now and forever be associated solely with thousands, perhaps millions, of facebook posts of cute kitten memes. That would be easy to filter, but its not like world wide civilization has any shortage of blandly familiar inoffensive fluff to use as a source.

Meanwhile build a worldwide black list, so no religious commentary at all, no alcohol / tobacco / other drug use, no political commentary.

It seems like a reasonable startup opportunity.

Meanwhile working the other side, another startup can work on filtering bland stuff from social media. Maybe with a secret back channel to the flooders. I would imagine, unfortunately, if you crossed off all the inane posts from most social media users, the end result would be many totally legit people having no record at all!

[njharman]

"Innocent concepts" are in the eye of the beholder.

And don't forget the True you will still be online. A service that only works if you yourself are limited to no religious commentary at all, no alcohol / tobacco / other drug use, no political commentary. Is really no service at all.

> false data has to be some kind of "white noise composite" of all internet content,

It probably does or will be easily detected and machine filterable. There's already algo's that make good guess if some texts were written by same person.

[marrs]

Facing divorce because your name appeared on a list is more than just embarrassing.

[njharman]

To expand on Retra comment. Either;

You are facing divorce cause you cheated on your spouse.

Despite not cheating, your name is on list. Your spouse is still divorcing you because there were other issues and it was coming name on list or not. Or, they're psyco (can't understand name on list is not cheating) and good riddance.

You have healthy marriage.

[marrs]

That's fine. I'm not arguing against any of that. Whatever the reasons, if your facing a divorce as a consequence of being associated with a naming-and-shaming campaign, this is more than merely embarrassing.

[Retra]

Maybe don't marry someone who will divorce you simply because your name is on a list?

[marrs]

Maybe you thought you did that

[Retra]

Touché...

[toothbrush]

Apparently this kind of "identity management" service already exists. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/21/internet-s...

[Ollinson]

I wonder if making your social media account mimic a spam bot would get it flagged for deeper deletion on the host servers.

[c_lebesgue]

I do not think spam accounts are ever deleted, just flagged. Maybe those created in some absurd numbers. After all they make a valuable training data for spam detection algorithms.

[dvh]

Or just change your real name to John Smith.

[amelius]

I've been thinking about this a lot. But the problem is that such a service would have to violate EULAs of many popular services like facebook and twitter.

[DaFranker]

EULAs are never legally binding, and especially not for someone who is 1) not currently a consenting user, and 2) invoking a right.

So in the EU, if current legislation projects bear fruit, a case could probably be made for implementing this under the protection of the right to be forgotten, and there would be very little those services could do to prevent it.

[tbrownaw]

EULAs are never legally binding

And blanket statements are always false.

[DaFranker]

Perhaps you'd like a rephrasing:

A EULA can never bind you into a legal contract that has consequences beyond those already provided for by a law or the ability of the copyright holder of the software to deny use of the license.

The EULA is itself purely informal, but informal speech can serve in the provisions of certain laws that look at it to determine the intentions of the two parties. If a law exists that considers whether a user agreed to something in the determination of whether that user must be held to that thing they agreed to, then accepting a EULA is obviously valid under that provision -- but so would an email stating as much.

EULAs are just a list of statements the copyright holder and the user are throwing at each other in bulk format in order to cover those provisions where laws take such statements into account, along with a conditional authorization to use the software. If a EULA does anything else, it will be ignored, as there is generally no law that says "You must do what it says in the EULA". Unless you have one where you live, in which case ouch.

I can say whatever I want in an EULA, but it's going to be worth nothing in court if the user stopped using the license unless I was saying something that directly ties into an existing law. And if they do continue to use the license after doing things I forbid in the EULA, they are committing the specific crime of unauthorized use, since I'm no longer authorizing them.

As much as some EULA writers might get a kick out of writing that you will be tried according to whichever court's law they want, and that you'll be held responsible for XYZ humongous damages if you breach even the tiniest provision even up to two years after you cease using the software... yeah, nope, you'll still get convicted for unauthorized use, not the rest of that crap they listed.

Mind you, I'm repeating what a canadian lawyer explained to me. YMMV and some places may indeed hold the EULA against you.

[MasterScrat]

Any counter-example about this particular case?

[nathanm412]

https://web.archive.org/web/20061124021646/http://www.justic...

He was threatened with 55 years in jail for abusing an account with the American College of Physicians after clicking accept on the EULA.

[icebraining]

I very much doubt any directive regarding the right to be forgotten will give you the right to use fake information. It's essentially inviting fraud.

[nitrogen]

What is the difference between a fake profile and a pseudonymous profile? Is it really fraud to use something other than your real name in non-financial settings? What about other-than-real data? People have been using fake names and fake data since the dawn of the net; why would this be any different?

[icebraining]

I don't see any problem with the practice per se, but I'd be wary of codifying such Right into law without opening a can of worms.

[TeMPOraL]

Isn't the right to be forgotten a can of worms already? In theory it's about individuals and their privacy, but in practice it's about fraudsters hiding their fraudlent behaviour so that they can continue being fraudsters.

[JupiterMoon]

> EULAs are never legally binding

Violation will certainly give the social media cite grounds and desire to delete the false profiles though.

[VLM]

Aren't their financial valuations based on account numbers and made up metrics like that?

So deleting this fraudulent account will cause a measurable, definable, actionable, $0.0001 decrease in shareholder value, ignoring it will have no effect on shareholder value, what is my fiduciary responsibility here?

[woody223]

You are not a fiduciary in this context so would not have fiduciary responsibility to the owners (public or private). Essentially your relationship is with the company as a user/buyer of their product or services and is governed by user agreement - which may be a blanket EULA and may or may not be enforceable.

[icebraining]

Not to mention blocking such fake-profile creation services.

[castis]

I feel that this would eventually give rise to services that filter out all the "bad" data.

[pavel_lishin]

Bogon Generation as a Service