Every so often, I get email about this site. About half the time, it goes something like this: "Wow. I'd completely lost touch with my half-sister, but there she is on your site, I'm so glad to find her. Could you forward my email along?" Or "I was just showing my son how google works, and he was thrilled to find a picture of himself. He thinks he's famous!"

The other half the time, it goes like this: "I can't believe you put my picture on the web without permission. Please take it down right away!"

The latter has been happening more and more, what with people being on the job market, people being hyper-aware of their web presences, and search engines being tactless enough to often make these pictures the first hit. (I'm glad the site is popular, but I wish google would be sure to put it below people's homepages, say at the bottom of the first page of results.) I'm sympathetic, but I don't want to take the whole site down. And it's just not feasible for me to ask each person for permission in advance. (Although AAR-related people may notice I've pre-emptively removed all their last names, after several complaints.) (By contrast, some friends have said, "Come on, do people really mind?") The best I can do, for now, is to make it easy for you to get these removed. Three main options, pretty simple, just email me and I'll do it.

Options for removal

From less to more drastic:

1. Remove your last name. This is what I recommend. Your name will show up as [first] plus [last initial]. This way, you can find photos of you, and I can find you, and people in photos with you can find you, but google won't find you. If you want, I'll change your id number in the database, so the link from google will stop working immediately.
2. Remove your name from (one or more) photos. If you looked silly in a group photo, I can take your name off, so the photo doesn't show up under your name, but everyone else (who looks fine) still has their name attached.
3. Remove the photo. If it's really clearly a bad photo, and it's only you, I'll gladly do this. Otherwise I'll grudgingly do this.

In any of these cases, be aware that google will cache the old version for a while. Such is life. Meanwhile, enjoy browsing everyone else.