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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."
If they think that google caches are bad... The caches go down a while after the website disappears...
Then there's Archive.org... Until a squatter with a robots.txt takes the domain, it's there forever if it's there!
While I think there is merit to the suggestion that the New York Times has a vested interest in criticizing search engines and internet archives in general, that conclusion cannot be drawn from the article at hand. The article makes a very valid point, that many people unwittingly put a lot of personal information on the net and it ends up being forever available on the internet.
For those who read this site, I am sure no one is going to leave anything important in a directory accessible via http, but it can easily happen. How many ridiculous personal websites are there out there, how many inexperienced folks with frontpage put something stupid on geocities before they figure out what is going on? It can happen so very easily.
Note, I don't think there is a way around this problem. The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index. I don't know if that is feasible, but it is a thought. In the end, I think this is something people are going to have to be more aware of... only the ignorant or careless are going to get burned by this.
On a personal level, I have searched for my name in the past, and found some interesting personal files and info... I won't be too specific, but this info was temporarily placed on other machines to access via http as that was the only way I could download anything to certain school machines. The shit was only on those servers for a few days, and it is still in the google cache. Nothing to important, but it has been there for YEARS now.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Now, not only does Ms. Crick have all that private information exposed on Google, she also has it all nicely collected in the New York Times. Oops.
I hope the New York Times is advocating that we burn past issues and library microfiches of their papers. Who knows how many private details could be contained inside all that publically published information?
Once something is published, it is published! It is public information. Destruction is no longer possible. Nor should it be.
P.S. Does anybody else hate the word 'Ms.'? Good god, I hate it when a woman introduces herself like that. Telling a man your marital status upon introduction is simply good manners. He can politely conduct the rest of the social exchange in a manner that keeps him out of a fist-fight later on.
Every time I go into an interviewer knowing the name, company, or email address of the interviewer, I will always look them up via google and deja, just to see what turns up. Once I found that the president of the startup company I was interviewing for had built a couple websites on commission and then spammed the hell out of several newsgroups in order to boost hits.
If you put stuff out there on the net, then you're stuck with it out there.
People post questions in newsgroups all the time and use their real names. Of course now that Google owns the Usenet archives, I guess that is their fault too. :-)
/. users are well-versed in the ways of the internet. If the article builds awareness about invasion of privacy, and makes general computer users more cautious, then it has done us all a service.
The general public is clueless about the lack of privacy on the internet. I can't even count the number of times I have surprised people by telling them how much information about them is logged by every website they visit, that web browsers keep a history of sites visited, etc.
The issue here is not that the NYT is telling us what we already know, because of course
It's very common to 'google' someone, and the phrase seems to have fallen into general use - particularly among the e-dating crowds. I have a few friends who date over the net and it's very common practice to type a potential date's name into Google to see what pops up.
To get around this problem, simply save the page to your hard drive, and open it from there. Your referer will now be some file:// URL, and it will work.
Then I remembered one of my fraternity Brothers. At MIT, Freshmen (things change drastically in the Fall of 2002) pretty much decide durring their first week in Boston where they're going to live for the next 4 years, this includes pledging fraternities. To make things less chaotic, each MIT fraternity sends an information packet out to each incomming freshman male and print out lots more to have on hand durring the week of rush. The information packet needs to be finished by the end of the term. One Brother (let's call him Joe) was too busy at the end of the term to put much thought into the personal bio blurb required from each Brother. He thought he'd force the editors to completely rewrite hsi bio from scratch by making it too awful to print. He listed his interests as "Chinese eating, Chinese sleeping, midget tossing, anorexic women with low self esteem, and bovine necrophillia". The editors called his bluff and put his bio, unedited, in the Rush mailer. The rush mailler got transferred into electronic form. Luckily, I jut checked Google for his bio and got no hits. His name only shows 30 hits, half of which are him. It's not really bad, but might cause some flags to go up with sme potential employers/potential inlaws, particualrly since all of the other bios were completely serious and normal. Some stuff you write as a joke may someday end up in big glossy pages and online where it seems in context, but is totally out of context.
Some day you may wish something about you was never online. Oh well, you can't do anything about it.
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
About two years ago, I read an article from the Washington Post by a Dr. Cindy Williams of MIT, formerly of the Congressional Budget Office, who stated that she felt that military personnel were adequately compensated -- and in many cases overpaid -- for the jobs they do. The Post included her e-mail address, so I decided to write a response to that. At the time, I was in the Air Force myself, and the son of a 26-year Air Force veteran, so what she said understandably got my dander up a bit.
Since my father forwarded me a copy of the article, I figured I'd send him a copy of my response as well. This was a mistake; he actually liked what I wrote and forwarded it to some of his friends, who sent it to their friends, and so on ad nauseum.
Now it's been archived on a number of different websites, and I have no control over my own words. There are two glaring changes that have been made to what I wrote, and someone added to the message that Dr. Cindy Williams is the same Cindy Williams from "Laverne and Shirley." That's landed me on all the urban legend websites, like Snopes, About.com, and Truthminers. I don't own those websites, so anyone can go to them and discover that I was dumb enough not to keep my fool mouth shut in spring of 2000.
If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands), do a Google search for "A1C Michael Bragg". Ugh.
They that would sacrifice their
The Google cache is causing publishers to lose control over their material.
In Britain, publishers are required by law to send a copy of everything they publish to the British Library in London. I'm not sure if the USA has anything similar but libraries exist pretty much everywhere.
Does having these copies available to the public at the British Library cause the publishers to 'lose control over their material'?
Does someone who puts information out into the public domain have the right to withdraw that information whenever they like? I don't think so.
also (from the article:)
First, to me personally, the way the world would run without assumed privacy is much better. (By assumed privacy, I'm referring to the belief that, by default, all actions are private. In my mind, all actions are public unless I make an effort to make them private. Ergo, what I'm saying is that I think privacy is necessary (i.e. passwords, etc.) but that it should never be assumed.) I think that once people realize that everyone is fallible and has done dumb things in their past, it'll alleviate a lot of stress in the world--privacy makes a lot of guilt.
Second, some of the things I live my life by are: you can't undo what you've done; align your actions with what you really believe; and no lie is air-tight. I think all those things are good things to believe in, and if everyone believed them too (ha ha) then assumed privacy wouldn't be necessary. Basically, I don't have any reservations about forcing everyone to take responsibility for their actions and thereby (gulp ... fingers crossed) making everyone a bit more humble and forgiving. I know it doesn't follow, but I think that's the way it would work: there would be some people who lead their lives to infallible perfection, but I cannot believe that would be a majority and I cannot believe that minority would be in charge somehow, so the majority would be in power and prone to err which would allow everyone to live pretty freely.
Of course maybe this will come back to haunt me someday and I'll have completely changed my mind ...
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
You don't give away the right to redistribute by publishing something, unless you explicitly state this. The copyright laws applies on the Internet, just as they do with printed media.
I think it's hilarious that once she realized there was a ton of her personal information on the internet, the first thing she removed was that story. You think her SSN and credit card numbers are encoded in there somewhere?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
From my perspective, the problem is not that *I* can put stupid stuff up myself, its that *other people* can put stuff up about me. I know about this from personal experience.
I am the author of an old (early 90's) steganography program called HideSeek. If you search google for my name almost all the matches are for me, and refer to this program. Not only is it poorly written (only early versions are widely disseminated), but I am because of it associated forever with child porn and terrorism. I stopped developing stego stuff many years ago, mostly because I dislike many of its uses. However, my stuff lives on. and probably will forever.
Also on the web, you can see me getting flamed on cypherpunks newsgroup for accidentally sending HTML email. Not particularly something I'm proud of.
I have NO CONTROL over these sites, I CANNOT make them take it down, I CANNOT put a robots.txt up, nothing. Zero. So, make a mistake when you're 20 and it will follow you FOREVER on the web. Oh joy.
you know, you can't ride the concept of the horse.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The knee-jerk "robots.txt" and "don't give it out" reactors should be modded down for not trying to understand the problem and proposing a solution to a different problem. They probably didn't read the article.