The locations where the mailing list are archived are not even
controlled by any member of R-core or the R foundation. Everybody,
including John, could collect mails from the list and publish them.
This is a well known property of a public mailing list.
Uwe Ligges
On 17.09.2013 13:29, Adan Leobardo Martinez Cruz wrote:
Dear all,
I will express my opinion without knowing the details of the posts John would
like to be removed.
In the current state, people posting on this and other servers have no clear
way to go when trying to remove their posts.
It is a likely event that the number of people attempting the removal of their
past posts will increase. Their reasons will vary and may or not may be
reasonable to us.
It seems that a discussion on how the R-server will handle this likely
situation is needed (including the possibility of keeping the current policy,
of course)
Once the decision has been taken, a warning note would be helpful for newcomers
(something in big, black letters saying that whatever we post will not be
removed or something like that).
Best regards to all,
adan
________________________________________
From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [r-help-boun...@r-project.org] on behalf of
John Gonzalez [john.gonza...@gmx.fr]
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 5:14 PM
To: David Winsemius; Albin Blaschka; Duncan Murdoch; Jeff Newmiller; S
Ellison; Jim Lemon
Cc: r-help@r-project.org
Subject: [R] Re : Privacy rights of an old user of this list
I would like to thank David for letting me publish this and discuss it openly.
I must acknowledge from the answers that I received to my post, that the
administrators of this list are doing what seems to be fair to me: what most
people demand or understand that is right.
However I don't share your views and I honestly think you are making a mistake
which may hurt you just as much as it is hurting me now) in the long term. Let
me develop my point.
First of all let me clarify for those who accuse me of being desinformed or
innocent about my request, I'm not asking for your collaboration to remove what
I published from the internet, its google records or any of the infinite copies
that may be lying around. I'm asking for a very simple thing:
There are 7 messages (sorry it wasn't 3...) written by me and hosted at the
server stat.ethz.ch
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2009-March/190367.html which I would
like to have removed.
Now, Steve E makes a good point: "I am also of the opinion that the list owner was
not showing disrespect by describing the state of affairs you agreed to on signing up, or
by declining to act beyond the requirements of the conditions applicable to the list.
" Steve
Fair enough. But that doesn't mean that those conditions are right and should never be
modified. I'm probably something similar to an unhappy customer who has bought a product
with no money-back policy but with an important distinction: I'm going to be wearing this
product for the rest of my life. So that makes me, if anything, a "very unhappy
customer".
Now let me explain why in this world I'm spending time on requesting the
removal of these 7 messages in that server.
I have a MS in Computer Science and a 5 years long Telecommunications degree, I
know quite well how the internet works. This is not the first time that I
request this. I already requested it in another mailing list, where they were
kind enough to aprove it after I verified my identity and they checked that
they weren't removing anything critical. The result was that that piece
information was obviously not erased from the entire internet but was not
showing up in the first 12 pages of google when you would look up my name (when
it was on the first page previously). It took me 5 requests to different
servers but I managed. There is nothing impossible about it and it made a
difference in my life.
So why is this important for me (something like not showing up on the first
pages of google?). Well please understand that there is a difference between
publishing an article and writing an email to a list. An article goes through
several personal revisions and is examined by a professional reviewer before it
is published. It only takes a click to send an email. It is extremely easy to
make mistakes (particularly when you are young and you know little about life).
Actually, people make lots of mistakes and banks may use it to deny you or give
you credit, employers to give you an opportunity or not, a lover to have more
or less reasons to meet you etc etc etc. Removing this information from servers
that are more visited by the search bot crawlers makes a difference: your
banker will have to spend more time or resources to refuse your credit request,
your lover may be already calling you for a date, your employer may be already
calling your for an interview.
Now, if you have a lifetime job, if you never want to change your career, if
you will never need a credit, if you have a lovely, healthy and loyal wife,
what I just wrote may sound meaningless but if anything happens to your life,
you may end up remembering what I said and suffering like me.
Why? Because you it is not possible to remove 7 messages from a server? OK,
this is surely extra work that may be difficult to handle but have you
considered adding a small fee for those removal requests? I would be more than
happy to pay for it.
"There are a quite a few of my postings to newsgroups that I wouldn't mind
seeing disappear and even a few on the Rhelp archives. I just don't think that my
errors in judgment or
knowledge deserve to be ignored. My hope is that I am judged on the balance of
useful versus boneheaded." David
I hope that my point is clear by now. My original motivation was and continues
to be that my name was associated with a company that I don't want to be
associated with (may I keep my reasons private?). My knowledge or
professionality is not at stake for what I said. I can actually prove to you
that I abandonded my career in engineering and I'm working in things that have
nothing to do with it.
Looking forward to hearing your opinions again.
Best regards,
John
----- Message d'origine -----
De : John Gonzalez
Envoyés : 12.09.13 15:40
À : r-help@r-project.org, r-help@r-project.org
Objet : [R] Privacy rights of an old user of this list
Dear subscribers of r-help, I would like to know your opinion about a privacy problem
that I recently had after publishing to this list. Not a long time ago, I requested
to the administrators of this list that they removed 2 or 3 old posts from mine.
These posts were associating my name with an old company for which I worked a few
years ago when you would look up my real name at google. I'm 100% aware that there
are many mirrors of this list archive and that this is a hard work, however my point
was to move their google references to later pages so that new people that look up my
name would focus first on more recent work that I see as more relevant for what I
would like to do in the future. This is the answer that I received from Mr.
Winsemius: << Such a service is not available. Almost immediately rhelp
postings are replicated in multiple websites around the world. The information that
you could have (and should have) read at the time of signing up is here:
https://stat.!
et!
hz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help ... and the relevant sentence is: "Posters should be aware
that the R lists are /public/ discussion lists and anything you post will be *archived and
accessible* via several websites for many years." >> I followed up explaining that
at that time I was too young to understand the consequences of what I was doing and that,
honestly, I didn't pay attention to such a note. Mr. Winsemius didn't understand the reason of
my request and therefore decided to ignore it, even after asking a representative from the
company mentioned in my old posts to contact him to request the removal of such posts. At this
point I feel completely powerless and disturbed that the administrators of the r-help list
refuse to remove a text that I decided a long time ago to publish here. I don't think that they
own the rights of what I wrote and I wonder what I have done wrong to be disrespected in such a
way. Best regards, John Gonzalez (pseudonym) [[alternative HTML vers!
ion!
deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-pro
ject.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do
read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide
commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
