[R] Privacy rights of an old user of this list

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 13-09-12 9:40 AM, John Gonzalez wrote:
> 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:

I think you misunderstood his response.  Your request is not possible. 
The administrators of this list have no control over most of the sites 
that archive it.

It's possible that you could approach those sites individually and ask 
each one to remove its copy of your postings, but it is unreasonable to 
expect the administrators of the list to do that for you, and honestly, 
I suspect you'll be unsuccessful in having your old messages purged 
completely.  Your messages were public as soon as you sent them, and 
it's very difficult to erase public records.

Duncan Murdoch

> <<
> 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.ethz.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 version deleted]]
>
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