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NYT Discovers the Panopticon
Erris writes "Should we be surprised at the NYT attacking search engines? This article seeks to blame Google for all privacy loss, as if someone else remembering and sharing the things YOU publish is worse than credit card purchase databases, phone records, credit records being created and shared by OTHERS without your consent. Libraries must really be evil."
When you run a website you have a variety of optiosn available, most reputable search engines will follow a robots.txt, and if your still paranoid after that you can deny access to the ip range of popular search engines. If you aren't willing to do these rather simple things to protect your 'privacy' you shouldn't post things on a website. Who knows what the teaming hordes of 'internet crazy folk' could do when they find my short story, surely they are all deviants and sexual miscreants. I know, i'll get INTERNATIONAL PRESS COVERAGE to make sure that my Privacy remains safe.
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Insert Witty Sig Here
This is a ridculous way to look at privacy.
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
Let's see, you put your information in a public forum such as the web and you expect it not to be indexed? Gee golly willickers and shucks, Mr. Peabody, people sure are stupid.
You want privacy? Don't put a fucking webpage up. Now the distinction between credit card companies and the rest of the ill-begotten like minded ilk is well taken. I didn't do anything other than purchase somethings using that credit card, and yet, they can sell my information to any Tom Dick and Harry that wants to know my underwear purchasing habits?
Fuck them. NYT has ceased to be an informative source of news for a while. And it has never been a source of unbiasednews.
Humorless sig goes here.
#1 - If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.
/. (this is the only punctuation-only phrase I would ever use as a verb by the way) the site, we can (usually) still see it. Please consider the value of this service for your sake, and posterity's before you rant about of all the precious privacy we've lost.
/. after imbibing respectable amounts of alcoholic beverages. Just trust me on that.
#2 - Google (and others I'm sure) do all of us a great service by caching the last known good copy of a site. Then when we
#3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right? So why do you need a name, other than for identification purposes which is directly tied to our seeming need for ownership of resources? Don't forget, you are not your identifiers, or circumstances. You will always be you no matter the circumstances. At least, that's true until you die... then you are still what you will be. But before you get stressed out by that, I urge you to consider what you were before you were born. Remember that? Me neither. No point in stressing out about it then, eh?
#4 - Do not post to
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
It didn't look to me as though they were so much attacking the search engine per se, as they were simply commenting on it. Or that they were "attacking" anything, really--that's just the story submitter's slant.
The problem is more far-reaching than just search engines, anyway; after all, nobody could find the stuff if all the individual websites didn't have it on-line. Personally, I find it kind of reassuring...if I have descendants, they'll be able to find out all about me long after I'm gone by browing through the old web files, reading my livejournal entries and USENET posts, and so on.
I have always been aware that search engines could turn up things you'd rather not have seen...back when the search engines first came out, a friend of mine was chagrinned to find, when he searched on his own name, the majority of the results related to an old piece of Vampire fanfiction that he'd sent to a mailing list with about four people on it, and had thought to be safely dead and buried--and hardly anything was linked to his more recent, more professional writings. That taught me a valuable object lesson right then and there...if you're going to do something on the 'net that you don't want people linking with your name, do it anonymously. Web email services come in very handy for that sort of thing...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Why do you think I use a nickname when posting on Slashdot?
Why do you think my "homepage"on Slashdot resolves to a free web page that has not been updated for years? A web page that contains no real tangible personal information whatsoever?
Why do you think my "email address" resolves to a free email address on Yahoo?
Why do you think I do the same for almost every forum I participate in?
Only a few people, using Google or other search engines, would be able to guess who I am -- and these are probably my closest friends. And even them would probably have a hard time guessing it was me.
Come on, people, blaming Google for a lack of privacy is as stupid as saying that Microsoft will save us from wily hackers with Palladium.
No Privacy? No problem. Just maintain a couple of anonymous online clone and post using "their" names. And, yes, I did register with the NYT using the same nickname... =)
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
But because she writes educational games (2 words that should never be seen together) it's an invasion of privacy story.
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Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Do you introduce yourself as Mr. Henry, single?
Why should women?
it seems like geeks built an internet that reflected their values and needs, then they showed other people what it was and what it could become.
Everybody was excited...wow, an information revolution.
It seems like the people who always tend to get what they want are beginning to decide that they never really wanted an information revolution, and now we're seeing the counter-revolution.
It was an article pointing out the fact that a lot of personal data has entered the web, and it's hard to erase. What the hell is the matter with you people? Can't you tell the difference between a news or feature article and an editorial? And what's with the mindlessly combative tone? "Should we be surprised at the NYT attacking search engines?" When has the NYT come out against search engines? This makes absolutely no sense.
as if someone else remembering and sharing the things YOU publish is worse than credit card purchase databases, phone records, credit records being created and shared by OTHERS without your consent
Where does it say that the examples the article cites are WORSE than credit card purchase databases, phone records, or credit records?
The way this story submission was phrased made no sense whatsoever.
Why should this come as a shock to anyone? The information that was posted, was posted by the author in a public domain.
The internet, in it's current incarnation, was created to be a public domain of knowledge, freely accessable by anyone who had the will to retrieve the data. She willingly put up her 5th grade story of the turtle, as well as a slew of other data. Why, then, does she have the right to complain when someone does a simple search and retrieves it? Should I complain if I put a billboard advertising my name, along with my resume, and a short story I wrote, and someone happens to actually read it? This is simply ludicrious. The argument attempting to be made is, if a person willingly posts something using their name, in a public domain, they should still have complete anonyminity. This, I find rediculous... As an aside, geneology records have been freely available for decades. Just ask the Latter Day Saints, who happen to have the largest collection of geneological records (not just of LDS people, either) in the country. The fact that someone simply added functionality by placing the database on the web does not mean that searching it was wrong.
The second issue raised, however, is perhaps the more important one. If a person deletes content, for fear of repraisal, etc, then that content should be deleted. I belive this applies only to the individual, and his/her personally controlled sites, however... For example, if I post my resume online, then recieve a slew of calls from unsavory characters, then remove the resume, the resume should no longer exist on the internet. Google shouldn't be caching personal webpages like that.... However, we must also realize that once something is posted on the internet, it is, more or less, in the public domain. What the public chooses to do with the information posted is up to the public. Ergo, if I post my resume, and some schmuck copies it a thousand times and disseminates it to all of his buddies, too bad for me. I posted in a public forum.
The main thing for us to remember, though, is that we live in a society where the notion of property rights of the individual vs the benefit gained by the community is being raised and challenged. In my huble opinion, if the rights of the individual don't cause harm to the community and benefit the individual, we should side with the individual (removal of a resume for instance)-- all other instances, we should side with the benefit of the community.
-jokerghost
Doesn't the NYT report on everything from births to marriages to arrests and don't they have archives going back decades? Seems a bit hypocritical.
How to download music, movies and pictures while you sleep.
I believe Ms. Lee's uncommon last name came up in an earlier /. discussion (where else might I have read about it?). According to a poster in that discussion, Ms. Lee's parents, who ethnic Chinese, gave her the numeral 8 as a middle name because eight is considered a very lucky number in Chinese.
An ethnic Chinese colleague once explained to me that eight is lucky because the sound for eight ("Ba"?) in Mandarin is a homophone for various good and worthy things; if I recall correctly, among them wealth and fatherhood.
(My former colleague is formerly a citizen of Taiwan; he's since been naturalized a US citizen, and with a fine and subtle humor, now declares that he prefers to be known not as a Chinese-American, not as a Taiwanese-American, but as an "Asian-American", thereby poking fun at the U.S. political correctness that, in attempting to be non-offensive, ends up lumping all diverse Mongoloid-appearing peoples -- regardless of whether or not their forebears hailed from Asia -- and excluding any Asians who are not Mongoloid -- into one fictive group that makes sense only in terms of U.S. racial politics.
He explains it almost as if it were a duty of citizenship, an honor and a source of pride, to accept a designation that makes little sense in terms of his life -- he feels little kinship with those strange-customed Cantonese, much less Hmong or Filipinos -- but which is fervently believed by his adopted country. Having embraced him in citizenship, allowing him to retire in a wide land sparsely populated enough -- compared with his experience -- that he can find broad lakes in which to fish in quiet solitude, he is content to not merely accept but to embrace in reciprocity our strange customs and odd ideas. He's a good man, a good citizen, and wise enough to find the humor in it as well.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
In other words, she wants to be able to pretend she didn't say something that she said.
Mr. Fahmawi, the economist, said he envied the ability to be a name in the crowd. "If I had a more generic name, I'd sign petitions with impunity," he said.
Isn't the whole point of signing petitions that you're saying, "I wish to stand up and be counted as having such-and-such an opinion"?
It strikes me that these people are afraid of who they are and what they believe in. If you don't wish your view on a topic to be known, don't sign a petition - but then don't complain that your views aren't being heard. If someone confronts me with an opinion I've expressed on the web somewhere, I'm quite happy to either admit I was wrong and have now changed my mind, or give the reasons why I still hold that opinion.
Jon
A thought others had and solved long ago:
For individual pages: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOARCHIVE">
And if WYSIWYWG web authoring software doesn't make this feature easily accessible to it's dumb users, is that Googles fault? I think not. The NOINDEX meta tag has been around longer than Google, it was already supported by Altavista even before Google existed.
Along the same line, if the NYT webmaster is to dumb to know about the robots exclusion standard, they should probably fire him or get him educated. But in any case they should stop whining. The search engine operators certainly give them more than plenty of options to control the indexing/archiving of their content, even though they could simply consider it public and not care at all.
After all, do they have any control over their printed issue? Oh gosh, someone could actually collect all these printed newspapers and after 50 years come back with something the NYT said in a nasty article and would rather have forgotten!
Summary: if you publish you should expect people to read and remember. Why is this even news?
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
A lot of people seem to be terrified of the concept that in 20 years time, anyone with access to search/archival services and the inclination will be able to access all of the stuff they've said and published. Everything. Not quoted in part or paraphrased, but an exact copy as it came from the horse's mouth.
People want to be able to hide this information away, to disown it, to take their name off it, to dismiss it as a fabrication or a misquote.
I think it stems from the fact that nobody's perfect, but for some reason society has some mean doublethink happening - we know nobody's perfect but we still expect them to appear to be perfect! It used to be that if you were judicious about where you said things, and to who, your mistakes could be quickly retracted and covered up before they were preserved in some indelible form. This isn't the case when you put something on a web page.
Personally, I'm looking forward to where this is heading.. "people aren't perfect" won't just be the theory, it will be the practice. Mistakes will be more quickly admitted, rather than denied then covered up.
A while back, I was under the misconception that the Linux kernel odd-even unstable-stable scheme applies to minor version numbers (eg 2.4.13) as well as major version numbers. I stated this on Slashdot. Foot in mouth, I was wrong, I can never erase that and anyone can find it on Google. That I'm imperfect is harder to hide than before. Accept it.
hmmmm..
/.) who have managed to delete their ~/www and then recover large chunks of it from the google cache. Is the google cache really any different than someone who just saved a local copy of your page or site anyway?
Surely the whole point of the internet was to make your data (be it scientific data, your family tree or your pr0n collection...) publicly available. Complaining that the internet works as it was designed to is just plain stupid!
The Google Cache questions is an interesting one though. Yes the cache will remove data if a site dies (after a certain length of time), but it still does store your data. But is this really a problem? I know people (and read the stories about others on
Anyway IMO it comes down to a very simple choice:
Do you want world and dog to see your site?
if Yes -> stick it on the net
if No -> Protect it with a password, or just as simply DON'T PUT IT ON THE NET
I was 23 by then, I am 30 now, and I have changed. Not least when it comes to politics, for example. I would like to be able to ask Google to remove these relics of the past which misrepresent me today, and I can't.
It's not fair to attack Google for this, but it is reasonable for a non-techie paper to report on the potential risks.
What's wrong with leaving a trail on the internet? I say that this ability to be remembered or searched is a good thing - it leads to accountability. If you want the world as your audience, you have to be prepared for some of them to remember what you said. This leads to (possibly) better content, since we assume that what they write can be found at a later date.
/. trollfest - even if most people didn't indulge in this sort of activity, those who did would ruin it for the rest. Would you want to be the sane voice of reason amid 400 pr0n links and frist porsts?
/. comments which are too numerous) and I even have a section of my upcoming web site devoted to that (yes, that's the url above, yes it's my real name, and I'm not going to answer your third question).
Then look at the other side - what if there was a beautiful privacy system online that allowed everybody to hide what they want to hide, yet still have freedom of speech. I would expect many sites to turn into a sort of
I might be in the minority here - I frequently contact authors of web articles and always leave my real information. I find that when you aren't afraid to introduce yourself, people are much more willing to listen. I just make sure to write as if it's going to be shared with the whole class. I try to keep track of where and when my words find their way to a permanent spot on the web (excluding
If you can't stand by what you write, you shouldn't be writing it. If you make a point to always use good grammar, check your spelling, and make sense then you can be proud of what you write. The NYT article looks at the "horror story" angle of posting garbage to the web and having it come back to haunt you when you look for a new job. I say, turn it around and impress the employers with your concise, articulate, sensible, or even humorous opinions.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I'm more worried about what you and I cannot find on Google, but which the FBI can.
Google's privacy policy claims that they do not collect identifiable information from the user. However, many users now have static IP numbers. New laws passed by Congress last year give authorities the right to obtain the information in Google's possession, apparently without a showing of probable cause, just as they now have the right to obtain logging information from Internet service providers, and borrowing records from librarians. With the new Patriot Act, the use of the GET instead of the POST method for Google searching makes their case even weaker, as the authorities can claim that the search terms are part of the URL, and that they get logged with the URL in normal httpd logging. Therefore they may fall under the definition of "routing and addressing" information that is subject to "tap and trace device" scrutiny. Judges are required to approve orders for such scrutiny without a showing of probable cause.
The fact that Google records unique cookie ID, plus IP number, plus date and time, makes much of their information "identifiable." Authorities can also do a "sneak and peek" search of a Google user's hard drive when he isn't home, retrieve a Google cookie ID, and then demand a keyword search history from Google for this ID.
Google has refused to address this issue. They do not respond to inquiries about why they need a cookie that expires in 2038, nor have they responded to recommendations that they institute a log retention policy, in which logs are destroyed after 60 days or so. There is nothing quite so revealing as a history of all the search terms that someone has used in Google searches.
Librarians are worried about the new law, and the American Library Association is recommending retention policies as one of the only means at their disposal to avoid compromising their profession. It's even illegal for a librarian to disclose that the FBI came a-knocking for their records!
Meanwhile, as librarians are struggling with this issue, Google is doing 150 million searches per day, and continues to fly under the radar because their colored logo is so cute.
Right, and unless one sprang from the forehead of Zeus as a god of wisdom, everyone is or was or will be ignorant or careless at sometime in their life.