favor

[Chris Hodgins]

Chuck Swiger wrote:
> vandrewlevich at momsandkids.org wrote:
> 
>> Hi FreeBSD. When googling my name, your list comes up 13 times because 
>> of a
>> thread from 2003. Could you kindly remove and delete this thread from 
>> your
>> archives? I would really appreciate it.
>> Thanks,
> 
> 
> Regrettably, there is no reliable or convenient way to remove old 
> postings from a public mailing list.  Part of the issue is that you're 
> asking to remove not just your postings, but postings made by other 
> people in response to the questions you asked in that thread.
> 
> Even if the FreeBSD postmaster (acting as list manager) did so and 
> rebuilt the Mailman thread archives manually, Google and other sites 
> which cache Usenet and public list traffic to their archives generally 
> retain information about old postings anyway.
> 

Google does offer a way to remove posts that you have made from its index:

http://www.google.co.uk/googlegroups/help.html#9

IANAL but I think it would be interesting to know what the legal 
implications are here.  Could it be a legal requirement that you can 
request that your data is removed?

Chris