Cloaking for User Name Privacy?

[janharders]

I'm the tech-slave for a few websites, some of them including forums and we've got more and more requests from people worried about privacy and google. Two recent cases which are good examples for a trend I've been picking up in our incoming support requests.
On user asked us to delete a forum post she made four years ago. Now, it wasn't anything embarrassing, just your average friendly informational posts about dog food and which brand her dog likes best. She was happy when we suggested to remove her (real) name from the message so google and the others won't list the site when queried for her name.
Another guy was interviewed for a e-mag of a trade union and is job hunting right now, asked us to remove the copy of the pdf since he had multiple potential employers congratulate him on his dedication to workers' rights before telling him the position is no longer available. We removed the file and he's satisfied.
Still, I'd love to save them the hassle of contacting us (and me the time to remove / alter files and reply), so I was thinking of cloaking a little. Cloaking, since, to my knowledge, google does not yet support anything like the robots-nocontent-class yahoo supports.
The idea is pretty simple: Serve a thread to google, just substract the actual usernames and replace them with something general, say "A user", thus, users have improved privacy because others won't be able to get a pretty complete profile of them (in some cases, some are starting to use more and different aliases) by just "googling" them.

I did search a little but could not find any information on google's thoughts on that matter, buy maybe I was just using the wrong keywords. Does anyone know about something google said in relation to the issue? If not, what are your thoughts, legitimate cloaking, grey area, bad idea?

[Quadrille]

A much better idea would be to encourage all your visitors to use false names; also check how your terms and conditions control copyright matters.

I had a member of one of my forums want to remove all her posts, however innocuous, because she was being stalked (how that made a difference, I don't know!), and it ended up with with many, many threads making no sense at all.

And others may make such requests maliciously.

Cloaking can get you banned, though I have no idea how big the risk is.

But I really don't think it's the tool you need for this job; besides which, will your members feel safe? After all, you may be concealing it from Google, but others may find it, quote it, link to it forever. And everyone in your niche will still see the originals.

[edited by: Quadrille at 3:09 am (utc) on Dec. 9, 2008]

[janharders]

Yes, I am aware that cloaking might get you banned, however I am also aware that google has stated in the past that it's not about cloaking in general but about black hat cloaking. I personally think that privacy is a legitimate matter. Since I'm not actually sending "different" content to google to improve my rankings or whatever, I don't think a manual review by google would result in a ban - an automatic one might, yes.

While I agree with you that users should use false names / aliases to protect their privacy, it's just not the way to go. On the one hand, i worry that telling users to use aliases and fake names and explaining why will, even if they understand and agree, make them feel uncomfortable and unsafe - and that's the last thing I want them to feel on our sites. On the other hand: even those who do use aliases, for example "firstname foobar" usually use them across several forums and communitys, so searching for that nickname will also bring up the same issue. I don't think that your average user is likely to spend time "managing" his privacy by remembering the (very) different user names he or she uses on different sites.

I had a member of one of my forums want to remove all her posts, however innocuous, because she was being stalked (how that made a difference, I don't know!), and it ended up with with many, many threads making no sense at all.

Right, and that's exactly why I'm thinking about this. Of course, I could solve this via the TOS, maybe telling the users I'll be happy to anonymize their posts but not delete them, but wouldn't it be neat if the problem didn't become a problem in the first place?

After all, you may be concealing it from Google, but others may find it, quote it, link to it forever. And everyone in your niche will still see the originals.

You're right, but I don't worry about links or quotes that much and neither do my users because the majority of those cases is directly connected with google, msn and yahoo. Plus: those new annoying "services" gathering information on almost any given firstname lastname combination primarily use the search engines as their data source.