I was harrassed by a former employee whom I had to let go.
A friend recently brought to my attention that there was a very slanderous post dated the year 2003 about me on a Google group search in their Alt. Crime section. Now that I think of it about once a year somebody approaches me and asked me about that crime. In the past I said i did not know what they are talking about because I didn’t. Now I saw it for myself and it is somewhat embarrasing.
Bascially the guy cut and pasted a crime article about someone else and inserted my name in place.
I emailed Google a couple times and they refuse to remove it. They send me a form letter email telling me it’s not their place to dispute or bring credibility to any posts. They then proceed to direct me to deal with the original author of the post or take it up in federal court.
I wrote and sent via US Snail Mail to Google a registered letter demanding they remove the post. Not that it matters but I implied that I suspect a federal Judge would be irritated that a lot of time and money is wasted just to get them to remove one post. I have not heard from them in a couple of weeks.
Any ideas on how to get the post removed for a minimal cost and time?
You have seriously mistaken the concept of Usenet. It is not controlled or maintained by any 1 company. Google groups is no more Usenet than Microsoft is the Internet.
It won’t ever disappear off usenet. Getting it off Google Groups might be sufficient though because I presume most people just search using Google and not other archives. IANAL but you can probably get an order of specific performance against this person where they themselves can tell Google to remove it. The author has that privilige, I believe. To do that you would actually have the sue the person in civil court for libel or defamation of character.
However, that’s a huge hassle. Instead you can try to raise internet publicity of this incident somehow and invariably link the name of the person who made the post with an explanation of how the accusation is false. Essentially somebody googling your name will see one post about you doing something, and somebody googling for this persons name will see a whole bunch of blogs labeling him a libelous doucheburger.
If I understand common carrier law correctly, they have to refuse your demands or else they face getting into a hellstorm of trouble later on. Don’t expect them to do anything without a court order, and even then it won’t be quick.
ftg is right about Usenet and the impossibility of removing the post completely. Usenet is older than the Internet and it is designed from the ground up to resist censorship. You might as well try to stuff the notes back into the bugle.
You’re threatening Google over this? I’m sorry, but you sound as though you think control over the Internet is a god-given right of yours. It’s not, and Google isn’t really at fault here. It’s like asking your library to burn a book because you don’t agree with something the author says.
On the other hand, it does suck to have misinformation posted about you. People shouldn’t be dumb/careless enough to trust random Usenet posts, but unfortunately they do.
If you don’t want to or can’t afford the time and resources to fight the author of the post, perhaps the best you can do is correct the misinformation with an accurate, factual rebuttal. Spreading lies about the other guy won’t help matters any and may open you up to countersuits.
You can make a simple page (or post) that states “If you’re reading Story X, it’s a fake. I, Buck Rogers, am not the person involved with this incident. An individual copied and pasted my name into an old news story. The original story was dated X/X/XX and can be found on Website X or Magazine X.” Make direct references or links to both the false Usenet post and the accurate news story and hope that people will judge for themselves.
The hard part about this is to get your post high enough in Google’s search results that people will actually see your rebuttal. Or perhaps you can simply reply to the post in question and hope that people reading the thread will see your response.
Or, you know, is that post really doing much harm? If it’s an once-a-year question that you can explain away, it may be safer to keep doing that than to potentially resurrect an ancient issue and bring even more attention to it.
Google runs Alt groups the way the SDMB runs an e-mail service. Sure, you can use the board’s profile listings to access people’s e-mail accounts, but that’s all it is. Likewise, you can use Google’s groups service to access USENET groups, but they have no more control over the content than MSIE or Mozilla does over the goat porn you used their browser to view.
If it was a moderated group, you could get the group moderator to delete it. But I have a strong hunch that it was not one.
Note also that you are unlikely to prove who actually posted it. Faking most of the header is quite easy to do on Usenet. The actual author merely has to say “I didn’t post it.” You have to then somehow prove he did. Can’t be done.
Look at the occasional incident here where someone leaves a PC where they are logged in to the SDMB and someone posts a message concerning ovine-love. How does one prove who really posted it? Usenet is even worse in tracking postings.
Sorry, no. By the time it hits the Google archive servers, it’s already on a few hundred thousand other sites. Plus, why should Google listen to a random Usenet moderator any more than they listen to Buck Rogers?
Plus, ftg is again right about tracking posts back to authors, and the general impossibility thereof. (I did say general: There is a trail of breadcrumbs in the headers not left there by the nefarious poster, but that can be pretty much useless in some cases.)
In regards to Google’s Usenet archive, you used to be able to delete (‘nuke’) a post if you still had access to the email address it was sent from or could get a court order that it was your email. This possibility was removed without explanation sometime around 2011, and some deleted messages were resurrected by mistake a few years before that.
If you’re European, you can have posts you wrote and posts you are cited in delinked from searches for your name by arguing that they are no longer relevant. Be prepared to appeal to your local DPA if Google is unwilling to delink requests. The DPAs will probably support you if the material is old and pose a problem for you.
One suggestion was to open a website/blog of your own, on any subject you want. Use it often enough that when somebody googles your name, your blog and and (other peoples link to it ) fill the first page or two of results.
