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

[David Winsemius]

On Sep 12, 2013, at 8:40 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:

If you would use an honorific, it would be "Dr." I generally use  
'David', however.

> <<
> 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

I have no memory of incompetence by virtue of young age being offered  
as the basis for the request. My memory regarding the basis for the  
request was a desire not to be associated with the the domain name of  
the company in question because of a claim that they had used  
unethical practices.  I determined with a Google search that there  
were multiple other sources of that information on various websites.


> 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.

If motive for not pursuing the issue, rather than policy and  
feasibility, is being questioned, it's more that I didn't see the  
reason (the originally alleged reason, not the recently revised  
argument) as compelling. 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.

> 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]]

-- 
David Winsemius, MD
Alameda, CA, USA