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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.