I found out about a month ago that one of these sites had an arrest record for someone with my same first and last name. As luck would have it he also is the same race and approximate age as I am. We don't really look alike but there are plenty of people who might google me based on a resume or something without knowing what I look like and confuse me with him.
The site was high on the first page of results for my name and it was extremely frustrating. I'm about to graduate and look for a job and it was embarrassing to think that that's what potential employers would first see. And yet there was nothing I could do about it -- heck, the person wasn't even me.
I'm all for freedom of information and those sites have a perfect right to exist. However, I'm glad that Google also has recognized that their business model doesn't serve the majority of its customers and pushed down the results. After reading the article I checked the results for my name and verified that the offending site disappeared from the first two pages. It may seem like a small thing but I honestly feel more comfortable talking to recruiters now than previously.
Try being listed by some angry vengeful anonymous person on that rip-off report website that will never remove anything under any circumstances (including lawsuit - and the founder claims to live a reclusive life in a mansion guarded by several security persons and always has body guards when he goes out). Anyone can make claims about you. Even if you didn't do business with them. Even if you don't even HAVE a business. They can list your name, address, domains, phone numbers, email address, and anything else they want. They, in turn, don't have to list anything. And google includes their ranks pretty high up on search results.
Have a jilted ex-lover? Have a pissy neighbor that is upset at you? Well, they can get meaningful revenge on you through this service. Every time someone google's you, they can find out all sorts of hideous things about you that are supposedly true. And there's nothing you can do about it.
Oh, you can subscribe to their corporate service for a LOT of money. I forgot about that. Of course, all it will do is put your RESPONSE to the vile and illegitimate complaints at the top of the page, instead of the bottom. It will still, however, show up on search results and so will the vile bullshit the anonymous person posted about you.
The Ed whateverhisnameis guy behind the site is one of the most disgusting and useless human beings on the planet.
Not just that. Thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act the operators of sites like Rip-Off Report have absolute immunity from legal action over their site's content so long as it's not copyright-infringing - it's not even possible to get an injunction forcing them to remove it. Doesn't matter if they know it's defamatory, or if they've made it impossible to find the original poster, or if the original poster can't remove it anyway, or even if they're openly making a profit from charging people to take down "defamatory" entries; they're still totally immune. (There's a workaround: if you can find the original poster you can sue them and get an injunction forcing the site to take down their posts in that lawsuit. Most of these sites make that impossible though.)
The worst thing about them seems to be that they accept reports about private persons, who are much less likely than a business to have the funds to pursue false claims. It is also
clear that their attitude stinks. To quote a recent Forbes article on Ripoff Report [1],
>Asked about a comment alleging
another woman had herpes,
Magedson responds: “This f——
broad probably did something.”
Edit: And look at the comment section on that article.
A general solution for this kind of problem: get other content above them in Google. This is not hard; mugshot pages and the like have very little PageRank mojo. The only reason they're at the top of the results is that there's nothing else with your name to compete.
All you have to do is make a few interesting things (blog posts, github, etc.) with your name on them and post them to sites like reddit, and they'll easily beat any data-combing reputation smear site.
>According to the article that isn't true, mugshot sites have high Google scores because people tend to linger on them.
I can only speculate about causes, but I also have someone in another state with my name (even a matching middle initial) on mugshot sites, and the tiniest other references to me (my wedding registry for example) knocked it off the top Google results page immediately.
As for 99.9% of people not having a GitHub account: so what? I was giving a suggestion relevant to a typical HN user, not advice for the general population. The general advice is to do things like that. The point is that if a wedding registry on theknot.com (Hell, I'm not even sure I made that wedding registry; it might have been auto-gen'd from our Amazon registry) can outsell the undesirable sites on Google, you can easily make ten results happen that knock it off.
GitHub just happens to be an exceptionally good one for an HNer, since it's the kind of thing that an employer is likely to actually want to see.
Most people do have know enough to make sure they have accounts in their name on Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogspot, Pinterest etc. which tend to rank very well in name searches.
This hasn't worked for me. My linkedin and Facebook accounts showed up above the mugshot but everything else was below it. My fairly active github profile, personal site, and twitter profile for example were all lower ranked than the mugshot site.
Google has supposedly been tweaking their algorithms for years to make sites that don't offer unique content rank lower in search. It's a bit puzzling that these mugshot sites can even manage to make the first page if they're all scraping and posting the same content. Most people by now would manage to have a few social media links that would push that stuff off of the first page, right?
I was in the same situation. The person even lived in the same state as me. They are currently in jail, but who would really look that far? I reluctant ly put a few public pictures of myself online hoping that anyone searching for me would notice the difference.
If you're very concerned, create a linkedin account with a nice photo, your college, etc and make this general information public. It will rank very highly and with a cross-reference on your educational info, a future employer worth working for won't mistake you for someone else.
This has nothing to do with Google's "business model", search is about relevance and despite the practices of these sites, I'm sure you can see how their content might be relevant and interesting to visitors. Those who processed the payment were the ones at fault since they were directly facilitating the blackmail.
There seem to be two distinct issues here: the fact that these websites publish mugshots, and the fact that they solicit payment to remove the pictures and information.
The first issue is clear, at least to me: this is public information and they have a right to republish it, like it or not.
On the second issue, I don't understand why this is not extortion. Obviously this is because my understanding of what constitutes extortion is faulty. Can any lawyers here explain?
1. We already have a court-system that's _suppose_ to be giving out fair punishment for crimes. Adding another "fine"(pay to get mugshots removed) to it I don't think is needed.
2. What happens if I start re-publishing mugshots? And then another person? And then another? How many fees is this person suppose to pay to stop it?
3. More likely than not, the person who's mugshot is online is probably not rich. Probably needs all the money they can get. Having to spend it on getting mugshot-copies removed from online I think is terrible, like kicking someone when they're down.
4. And finally, this is my biggest issue with this by far. It is assumed the person who got arrested actually deserved it. I, personally, have nearly zero faith in the American law enforcement and criminal system. I think it's almost completely corrupt and extremely bias towards certain groups. So the fact that people who've already been unfairly victimized by a broken system, once again having to pay X number of person(s) to get it removed from the internet is just plain unethical.
Here's why I don't think it's extortion. Imagine you have a neighbor that hates bicycles. You agree to stop riding yours if she pays you $100,000. Is that extortion? Obviously not: you have the right to ride your bicycle regardless of whether or not your neighbor likes it, and you have the right to sell your professional services (not riding a bicycle, in this case) to whomever you like.
(Perhaps she wants to sell it to a like-minded buyer, and you're therefore devaluing the property. Too fucking bad, right?)
A problem that I could see the mugshot sites running into is that they imply guilt, when the mugshots were only for arrests. Intentionally misleading someone seems a lot like libel.
I'm pretty sure you could find yourself in trouble with the law if you (or a friendly intemediary) were advertising Not-Riding-a-Bicycle-as-a-service whilst riding your bicycle in a manner which whilst technically not violating any laws about use of the roads, was clearly intended to induce them to pay up.
I think even many of the most ardent defenders of free press would take exception to a newspaper whose business model consisted of charging people not to write about them. Especially if they provided a bare minimum of factual information and then invited users to "tag" the photo with "suggested" terms like "scary, wtf, wino, beat-up", like one of the websites linked from the article.
> Several legal experts interviewed for this article said seeking money to remove mug shots from the Internet does not qualify as a crime such as extortion, since extortion requires a threat ahead of time to post the image unless the mug shot subject pays.
> "Wow - it does seem to come pretty close to the line," Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said upon learning about such sites. "I'd say it skirts the line but may stop just short. (It) depends on how a reasonable person would perceive this in terms of fear."
That definition of extortion is wrong. Extortion is when you threaten to commit a crime unless paid. Blackmail is when you threaten to publish information unless paid.
Pro tip: offering to sell the only copies of a photograph is not a threat to publish.
Well, it's blackmail, not extortion (extortion is threat of a normally illegal act, like breaking your legs, blackmail is threat of a normally legal act, like telling people that you are cheating on your spouse).
One of the local NPR media shows brought up this issue a while back, in regards to both mugshots and arrest records, and the embarrassment these public records can cause to people who were exonerated, or may have been guilty but turned around their lives. The show clearly came down on the side of the press to be able to publish public records, but the hosts were sympathetic to the concerns of people who wound up having their records published and available on Google for All Time.
I always thought the solution was simple - unlike the printed page, web articles don't have to be static. The publishers should allow the subjects of these articles to provide updates to the beat reports (subject to verification of course) to document the disposition of the arrest. You could imagine an article might say "June 1, 2003: Jane Doe arrested for drug positions (insert mugshot/arrest record" followed up "Update Feb 1, 2006: Jane Doe indicated that the case was dismissed, which was verified by court records. Ms. Doe has not been arrested since and documents provided by Ms. Doe (and authenticated by this publication) indicate that she graduated with honors from XX college and has been successfully employed as a mechanical engineer to positive reviews."
That may not help with the extortion racket problem with the mugshot sites, but one would hope that the media outlet websites would rank higher than the mugshot sites on search engines.
The thing I don't understand is why the mugshots are being published in the first place in the US. Like it or not, the internet is a permanent record so that mugshot of you at your worst time (but not convicted of anything), will be out there forever in some capacity if it gets published.
A little common sense trumps all of these other elaborate comments.
Why are mugshots publicized? To intimidate people. It means the police can coerce someone in to doing something with the threat of an arrest.
The NYTimes seems to be blaming private site owners who have added a little SEO juice, whereas county and government websites usually are written so poorly as to barely be crawl-able. The police are the ones publishing these mugshots online, the other sites are just re-organizing them to be a little more Google bot friendly.
I didn't see mention anywhere in the article regarding why the police releases the mugshots - I'm told by people working in legal professions that it's actually a means of ensuring that the police aren't overstepping their bounds and that people aren't disappearing into jail without a valid conviction in court. By making all of the information public regarding who they arrested the police can't deny arresting them later on; by releasing the information about why he or she was arrested, the public can verify that the police are arresting people for legitimate reasons. This is useful to the public, but I think it's implemented in too naive a fashion. It takes sensitive data about me and broadcasts it out everyone, any one of which could store it indefinitely and rebroadcast it indefinitely.
You can't just not release the information for the aforementioned reasons. You can disallow rebroadcasting the information - if I can't release it to others, then the police could potentially take the information down after a few days, make you disappear, and then we're back at square one.
I think in this case the danger of misuse by third parties outweighs the danger of police abuse. Maybe there's a better way of keeping the police force accountable?
First, some counties publish special lists of, for instance, men attempting to or procuring prostitution services aka "johns". So there's probably a fair amount of shaming and threat they get from this. Police are known to threaten arrest because even if they drop all charges just going to jail (especially on a weekend) can be an unpleasant experience, and there's little blowback for them.
Second, if the police want to disappear people, they'll just not save that arrest record. The publishing of a log only is only useful for cases where the police decide to "disappear" you after they've arrested and processed the subject. Even then they could release someone, document it, then pick them up around the corner for "disappearing".
It seems to me that this is the fault of employers not doing the proper research. I know if I was in HR or was looking to hire an employee I would pretty much forgo looking at those sites.
For example, what would this website tell me? Potentially, someone with the name of the person (same or not the same) applying for a particular position has had a mug shot. All that tells me is they have been arrested (if it's even the same person), that does not mean they were convicted, they didn't do some minor offense, or they did not as in this case "do their time."
The point is an employer should probably look at confirmed data, if the mugshot is not confirmed, it should really be tossed aside.
I agree. People need to assess whatever information they find before acting on it. The more well-known these become, the less influential they should be on any one individual.
Funny story. I went to a conference earlier this year where I met a very attractive sales rep for a company we were considering working with. She emailed some information a few weeks later and I was going to see about connecting via LinkedIn, so I Google'ed her name. First picture that came up was her mug shot from a DUI. From a professional standpoint I'm sure it haunts her.
Confirmation that salesperson drinks heavily doesn't to provide much new information. The most threatening aspect is probably that the mug shot didn't have her wearing makeup.
I believe having the photos linger after they are no longer relevant or applicable is libel. Even posting the mugshots originally can be construed as libelous. IANAL, but I would hope the technology will adapt (ie sites only publish if the mugshots are 'current' and that is subjective but not too unclear -- when a record is expunged they cease to be useful v. their damages as defamation; and sites be able to delete them when they are not current immediately - even automatically). Otherwise I see no reason why are not liable. Sue them, justice then legislature will follow in a decade or so.. Seriously though I think that's how it works..
No ones hitting this from what I consider to be the right angle. Let me digress for a moment.
I was arrested in Miami in November 2003 at the FTAA protest in Miami. Spent a night in jail, and eventually all charges were dropped. Read this if you want more info, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_model.
The point is that in my case, I was arrested and I am proud of that. I'll grant that "protestor" sounds more admirable than "had drugs on them". But I think they are similar in some ways.
The first and most obvious similarity is the overly-militarized police force in the US. This is the essence of the Miami Model, a now 10-year old strategy of approaching domestic protest movements militaristicly at the local police level rather than as citizens movements. By applying the same tactics to all law enforcement, we end up with situations of over prosecution for things like possession of drugs and paraphernalia that continue to haunt people for years. For what are minor issues (had a joint or some pills on them, throw em in jail) peoples lives are ruined.
So to the point I want to address is that it doesn't matter, of at least it shouldn't and it's getting better.
Yes, I expect to be Googled and screened when working at a new job. That happened so long ago that no reference really pops up in reference to @geuis (though no doubt it will now) but for me it doesn't matter since it was a protest/civil rights issue that I freely talk about).
But just how the stigma of smoking weed in the past doesn't really matter for jobs that matter anymore, the same thing is increasingly true for other recreational drugs. You did E and acid for a bit? Ok, but what kind of engineer/sales/etc person are you? If anything, I think exposure to certain drugs makes people more valuable because you can't help but learn something from it. I know I did.
My questions would be like, "So I found this and this, can you talk about that a bit?" This is to determine if they are detrimental addicts (no hire) or just recreational/past users.
I'll admit that my vision is blindered because I live in SF, lived in the Miami area, am a liberal, and work in technology. But I count myself as a bell weather of sorts. If the rest of the US is flagging behind in a modern mindset, then eventually they will catch up.
Anyway, I guess I'll wrap this up by saying that if someone has a record or doesn't fit into the ordinary pegs and holes, consider other factors when people look for work. Who knows what things you might have in your own past that you were lucky to avoid being arrested for.
It's less about "modern mindsets" and more about simple decision making heuristics. If you've got a stack of resumes for apparently competent candidates and 10 seconds of Google-fu turns up blog comments and OS code commits for most candidates with reasonably distinctive names and MugshotsOnline for another one, you're probably not going to invite the latter candidate in to explain their views on occasional recreational drug use.
I'll admit that my vision is blindered because I live in SF, lived in the Miami area, am a liberal, and work in technology.
This. For people who are dis-advantage or of the mediocre-middle, these things are much more damaging. A strategy of playing confident in the interview, for example, is worthless if you resume gets auto X'd before anyone reads it or extends you an offer to interview. The audience for this (crap) is HR and BigCo types and other SMEs that are understaffed that outsource hiring to consultuants. Ie, the group of people that will not understand any subtle technical distictions about what makes a good engineer or not, anyway.
If it really is public information then it's perfectly OK to publish it. Complain to the politicians if you don't like arrest records being public. If you're supposed to have a "clean" record then you should just lie to your employer and say "I wasn't convicted". That's what a cleaned record does anyway. Mr. Birnbaum would have been telling as much of a lie by not mentioning his conviction like he'd hoped to.
The thing that's especially repugnant is how the money changers can collude to do deny access to the financial system based on their arbitrary morals. Companies that collect payments should not be able to stand in for a court in determining if the activities of their clients are lawful or allowable.
Though the mugshot stuff is kind of lame, too. Taking care of it might be as simple as not making the record public unless there's a plea or guilty verdict.
Google is under no freedom of information restrictions; it is a business. They can choose to rank mug shot sites high. They can choose to accept or not accept AdWords money for mug shot related businesses.
They shouldn't be choosing to rank mug shots highly. They should be following algorithms that return results that people want.
On the second part, sure, they could decide mugshot sites are not eligible for AdWords, but it's not great to have Google deciding who can make advertising money. OTOH, they're already doing this so I suppose they could take some sort of ethical stance here.
I generally agree. It's interesting, though, to think how much they in fact do probably alter results. I'm sure people "want" things that don't appear on the first page, because there'd be a general freak out if they did. I think they probably have more cultural latitude in determining which ads they'll accept than which results they'll display.
Another option they have is to simply set the cost of mug shot related ad clicks higher. Since their pricing determinations are somewhat mysterious, it would be harder to critique them for that. Ultimately, it would probably come down to an ethical stance for them, because they would just be making less money as a result of what I would consider to be a more ethical decision. As it is, they are making money off of a system that appears to be wrecking careers.
When I see stuff like this, I feel so very very fortunate to have an extremely common name. It is extortion however to charge to remove images as far as I'm concerned.
More interestingly, the main lawyer fighting against those revenge porn sites was doing so on behalf of a company with the same business model. Smart tactic on their part - they got a bunch of free positive advertising in the press whilst helping to shut down the sites which were most controversial and therefore most likely endanger their business model.
From the friendly article: "But it can’t be extortion as a matter of law because republishing something that has already been published is not extortion.”
Here's an Evil Idea for a open source equivalent: foss-testing.org. Innocuous name, but it chains together user identities with checkins they've made that were 1) style violations 2) turned out to be bugs 3) turned out to be later security issues.
What do I care whether I have a style violation? Well, it's about using the dark patterns to make your "user page" (collected from publically available information so legally proof) sound as bad as possible. Similar to the consumeraffairs deal where every review is bad. So your prospective employer searches for "Bob Bobson" and sees a nice, professionally designed page that claims:
Bob Bobson has trouble following best practices for code styling, which could indicate a problem with following corporate standards: link to 37 instances of inconsistent naming/indentation/brace style on github
Bob Bobson has 7 github repositories where he has checked in 90% of the source. This may indicate a "lone wolf" that does not play well with others
Bob Bobson has 14 open issues in github trackers. This may indicate lack of following through on a project
Bob Bobson has closed 41 github issues immediately as "wontfix". This may indicate a technologically orientated user that is insensitive to user and customer needs
We've analyzed Bob Bobson's commit messages, and assigned it a English Comprehension Score of 4 (out of 10). This may indicate a communication problem.
Failing anything else, you can smear Bob Bobson by the projects he associates with.
Bob Bobson has contributed to TOR. The TOR tool is associated with child pornographers and drug traffickers.
Bob Bobson has contributed to KDE. The KDE project has 523,123 outstanding bugs. We're not directly saying it's Bob's fault, but you know...
Of course, you can't start off writing all negative smear about everyone. You want to start out by being positive, writing cool blogs about how your company analyzes OSS. Maybe buy some licenses for expensive static analyzers and share the results. Make some cool pages about Linus' or Guido's checkins. Maybe even sponsor a few OSS projects or OSS people.
How does this make money? Well, Bob Bobson does not like to be known as a team player. Would Bob Bobson like to dispel that conclusion based on publically available data in our proprietary algorithms? Well, as it happens we also sell a "TeamWork Evaluation Survey", where if you think your team work skills have improved you under go a comprehensive psychometric test (signed off on by our team of psychometric specialists) that verifies your team work skills. Of course, such a test is expensive, but isn't the $199 worth it to be given a prominent "Team Work: Gold Badge" score? All that other stuff we said about you being a bad team player will go away.
>>He added that the sites do, in fact, run afoul of a Google guideline, though he declined to say which one
BULLSH*T. Everyone is guilty and Google chooses when to use the hammer for profit or good press. That's how much integrity their results have. Google has known about these sites for ages, yet after NYT writes all of the sudden they are not relevant for users. Total BS.
Also the business of asking MC, VISA and Paypal to terminate services stinks, we saw this with Wikileaks.
Their business is repulsive, personally I'd favor a $5 wrench http://xkcd.com/538/ removal service over this.
The site was high on the first page of results for my name and it was extremely frustrating. I'm about to graduate and look for a job and it was embarrassing to think that that's what potential employers would first see. And yet there was nothing I could do about it -- heck, the person wasn't even me.
I'm all for freedom of information and those sites have a perfect right to exist. However, I'm glad that Google also has recognized that their business model doesn't serve the majority of its customers and pushed down the results. After reading the article I checked the results for my name and verified that the offending site disappeared from the first two pages. It may seem like a small thing but I honestly feel more comfortable talking to recruiters now than previously.