I was just searching an old teacher of mine to see how she was doing. I knew she was super old-school (doesn’t even have a smartphone, let alone social media profiles) but I thought, I’ll just see what comes up - it’s a little lower friction than calling her.
She still doesn’t have any online presence except for one thing. The top search result for her name was a Project Veritas video where they had cornered her to ask some questions about her workplace and skewer her for whatever soundbites they could get. It was heartbreaking.
It’s an example of the benefits of the “security through obscurity” security posture. If there’s lots of info about you online, then it waters down the impact of any potential negative information.
The “stay offline / stay ungoogleable” security posture, on the other hand, is fragile with respect to random spikes of negative information.
Reality is that there’s a gray area and most people have middling risk tolerance in this area. As for me, I rarely post on social media and have never deliberately cultivated an online presence, so I’m somewhat ungoogleable. But not so much that someone couldn’t find me if they really tried. An seo-heavy event like that Project Veritas thing would probably take over my SEO presence, but I’m okay with that risk, and I also have the skills to spin up an official personal site if I want to.
Only if your worst fear is bad PR.
If there is some sophisticated enemy who might want to attack you, then the fact that the embarrassing video is the 4834th Google result doesn't protect you from anything, it means there's at least 4834 results for you, all of which contain potentially dangerous information, instead of one.
I had a classmate in pre-Web days who lived in NYC and shared a name with someone who was widely hated in many NYC circles (don't remember the details). Anyway, my classmate got literal death threats by phone.
For a while, I actively tried to remove my google results, but there are still archive and social media sites that have my info up, despite my best attempts to take it down. There are also people’s personal sites that have my info, but I don’t want to contact them, because I doubt that these people would believe that this is a case of mistaken identity, and I don’t want to draw attention to myself all over again. I have family who had a similar thing happen, and they counseled me not to take legal action, since it would probably lead my harassers to double down.
So now I am trying to rebuild my actual, positive online presence, except for contact information, because I still fear for my physical safety all these years later. It is a delicate balance. The political situation here (US) is so unstable, the memory of the internet is so long, and developing technology (generative AI) is making it so that there might be a point in the future where a sufficiently motivated individual could exact political retribution on a whole set of perceived enemies at once. This would make my entire life a hellish experience (or end it), no matter the fact that I wasn’t an extremist. I feel that this makes my online presence as essential to my well-being as things like exercise, investing for retirement, etc.
There is a lot of information that's public as a matter of law--which arguably, in many cases, hasn't reconciled that a lot of public information is no longer just stored in a file cabinet in some dusty county or town clerk's office.
>sense that I got was that name changes for men are logistically challenging.
To the degree that's true I assume that women changing their names when they get married (or divorced) has been such a norm for centuries that it doesn't invite scrutiny (although I've heard plenty of complaints about what a headache it can be in terms of various IT systems etc.) I assume when men do it, there might be at least a suspicion that something shady is going on.
Take me, for an example. Google Greg Maxwell. You'll get a smear piece written by the associates of the fraudster that claims to invented bitcoin title "Crypto Crime Cartel: Greg Maxwell" several pages ahead of my own webpage (https://nt4tn.net/) which shows up only on the sixth page where essentially no one will see it. (hey, at least the smear piece not #1 anymore-- It was for a long time.)
(You could add 'bitcoin' to the search to get rid of most of the people who aren't me-- the "crime cartel" article is result #2 then, and my page is at the bottom of page 4-- again where few people are ever likely to see it-- after several other smear pages.)
So I think the threat of negative material is mostly orthogonal. You're probably better off invisible, you're screwed either way if someone well funded wants to trash your name.
I don't think the cost/benefit is likely to pan out. Of course, on the same basis, blocking yourself out of google results is also mostly irrelevant for the purpose of standing up against DRMing the web.