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.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]] ______________________________________________ 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.

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