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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."
NYTimes Login Generator, which I found thanks to Google. How ironic! :)
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.
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!
Its been said before, it will be said again! The fact that it is posted on NYTimes is mildly amusing (with their registration and all) but really when all is said in done the percentage of things you can find on the net that is not wanted up there by the individual it is about in which the individual or his/her family members did not post is absolutely minute.
Is Privacy a good thing? YES!!! is posting a family website up on the net and being suprised when someone else finds it Hypocritical? YES!!!!
I mean yes there is more to it then that but my 2000 word essay hours are between 9-5
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
#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!
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.
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
July 25, 2002
Net Users Try to Elude the Google Grasp
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
THE Internet has reminded Camberley Crick that there are disadvantages to having a distinctive name.
In June, Ms. Crick, 24, who works part time as a computer tutor, went to a Manhattan apartment to help a 40-something man learn Windows XP.
After their session, the man pulled out a half-inch stack of printouts of Web pages he said he had found by typing Ms. Crick's name into Google, the popular search engine.
"You've been a busy bee," she says he joked. Among the things he had found were her family Web site, a computer game she had designed for a freshman college class, a program from a concert she had performed in and a short story she wrote in elementary school called "Timmy the Turtle."
"He seemed to know an awful lot about me," Ms. Crick said, including the names of her siblings. "In the back of my mind, I was thinking I should leave soon."
When she got home, she immediately removed some information from the family Web site, including the turtle story, which her father had posted in 1995, "when the Web was more innocent," she said. But then she discovered that a copy of the story remains available through Google's database of archived Web pages. "You can't remove pieces of yourself from the Web," Ms. Crick said.
The gradual erosion of personal privacy is hardly a new trend. For years, privacy advocates have been spinning cautionary tales about the perils of living in the electronic age.
But it used to be that only government agencies and businesses had the resources and manpower to track personal information. Today, the combined power of the Internet, search engines and archival databases can enable almost anyone to find information about almost anyone else, possibly to satiate a passing curiosity.
As a result, people like Ms. Crick are trying to reduce their electronic presence -- and discovering that it is not as simple as it would seem. The Internet, which was supposed to usher in an era of limitless information, is leading some people to restrict the information that they make available about themselves.
"Now it's much more common to look up people's personal information on the Web," Ms. Crick said. "You have to think what you want people to know about you and not know about you."
These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.
In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."
Some believe that this loss of anonymity could be dangerous for those who prefer to remain hidden, like victims of domestic violence.
"If you are living in a new town trying to be hidden, it's pretty easy to find you now between Google and online government records," said Cindy Southworth, who develops technology education programs for victims of domestic violence. "Many public entities are putting everything on the Web without thinking through the ramifications of those actions."
Of course, a lot of personal information that can be found on the Internet is already in the open, having been printed in newspapers, school newsletters, yearbooks and the like. In addition, the government records that are moving online -- tax assessments, court documents, voter registration -- are already public.
But much of that kind of information used to be protected by "practical obscurity": barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information. Now those barriers are falling as old online-discussion postings, wedding registries and photos from school performances are becoming centralized in a searchable form on the Internet.
"Google and its siblings are creating a whole that is much greater than the sum of the parts," said Jonathan Zittrain, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. "Many people assume they are a needle in a haystack, simply a face in the crowd. But the minute someone takes an interest in you, the search tool is what allows the rest of the crowd to dissolve."
As a result, people are considering how to live their lives knowing that the details might be captured by a big magnifying glass in the sky.
"Anonymity used to give us a cushion against small mistakes," Mr. Brin said. "Now we'll have to live our lives as if any one thing might appear on page 27 in two years' time."
Waqaas Fahmawi, 25, used to sign petitions freely when he was in college. "In the past you would physically sign a petition and could confidently know that it would disappear into oblivion," said Mr. Fahmawi, a Palestinian-American who works as an economist for the Commerce Department.
But after he discovered that his signatures from his college years had been archived on the Internet, he became reluctant to sign petitions for fear that potential employers would hold his political views again him.
He feels stifled in his political expression. "The fact I have to think about this," he said, "really does show we live in a system of thought control."
David Holtzman, editor in chief of GlobalPOV, a privacy Web site, said that the notion of privacy was "undergoing a generational shift." Those in their late 20's and 30's are going to feel the brunt of the transition, he said, because they grew up with more traditional concepts of privacy even as the details of their lives were being captured electronically.
"It almost gives you a good reason to name your kid something bland," Mr. Holtzman said. "You are doing them a good favor by doing that."
Indeed, a generic name is what Beth Roberts, 29, was seeking when she changed back from her married name, Werbick, after a divorce. A Google search on "Beth Werbick" returns results only about her. But a search for "Beth Roberts" returns thousands upon thousands of Web pages. "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
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.
But those who have become more conscious of their Internet presence can find that it is almost impossible to assert control over the medium -- something that copyright holders discovered long ago.
The debate over privacy is particularly fervent in the field of online genealogy, where databases and family trees are copied freely, with or without the consent of the living individuals.
Jerome Smith, who runs a genealogical Web site, recently removed some names at the request of a man who did not want his children's information on the Web. But Mr. Smith noted the information itself had been copied from a larger public database. "Once you put it out there, it's out there," said Mr. Smith, who lives in Lake Junaluska, N.C.
Google says its search engine reflects whatever is on the Internet. To remove information about themselves, people have to contact Web site administrators.
A disadvantage of instant Internet profiling is that there is no quality control -- and little protection against misinterpretation. The fragments of people's lives that emerge on the Internet are somewhat haphazard. They can be incomplete, out of context, misleading or simply wrong.
John Doffing, the chief executive of an Internet talent agency called StartUpAgent, is surprised by how many job applicants ask him what it is like to be a gay chief executive in Silicon Valley. He says that even though he is heterosexual, some people assume he is gay because his name turns up on the Internet in association with his philanthropic work relating to AIDS and an online gallery devoted to gay and lesbian art.
While this has been more amusing than troubling, he says, such information could be misused. "What happens if I were a job seeker and someone decides not to give me a job because of the same assumption?" he asked.
There are also cases of mistaken Google-identity. Sam Waltz Jr., a business consultant in Wilmington, Del., met a woman through an online dating service. Before they met in person, she sent him an e-mail message saying that she did not think they were compatible. She had found his name on a Web site called SincereLust.com, which appeared to her to be run by a Delaware-based transvestite group.
"I'm sitting here, reading her e-mail and thinking, `What is this?' " Mr. Waltz said.
He discovered that the site was a drama group dedicated to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." His son, Sam Waltz III, had been a member while he was at the University of Delaware.
Mr. Waltz quickly explained the situation to the woman, and they have been dating for 18 months. "Now I periodically do a self-Google to make sure there is nothing else that needs to be challenged or checked," Mr. Waltz said.
Some say that the phenomenon of instant unchecked background searches could be manipulated to sabotage others' reputations.
Jeanne Achille, the chief executive of a public relations firm called the Devon Group, was horrified that someone had used her name and e-mail address to post racist slurs in a French online discussion group. She has repeatedly had to explain the situation to potential clients who have asked her about the posting.
"Whoever did this had to put some thought into it," Ms. Achille said. "Is it perhaps one of our competitors? Is it someone who felt we did something to them and wanted to get back at us? Is it a personal thing? Is it a disgruntled former employee?"
The posting has been impossible to remove. "There is no cyberpatrol that you can go to and make all of this go away," Ms. Achille said. "You just have to live with it."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
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
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)
Actually, no. I couldn't get it to work, even after several tries as well as resetting the randomization. I ended up having to randomize the data myself. Bastards.
Of course, the culture jamming aspects of DIY NYTimes accounts are entertaining. I enjoy creating outliers, knowing full well that the more outliers are created, the more polluted their database becomes. Honestly, the idea of some dope dba having to visually look at and delete an account created by a female clergy/skilled laborer born in 1935 making 130k+ in French Polynesia, wondering all the while why he doesn't just run screaming into the street and actually considering doing so, well, that kinda amuses me. A lot.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
it was sad in a way...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
This reminds me about my girlfriend, she searched her name on the web and found p0rn. /.
Since I write web pages too, she immediately assumed that I made this page with here name between all the naked girls. She almost left me and it took some time until she understood what happened.
Now I need to be aware that she will find this post, and will be angry again because I blamed her at
>> Had I been going to bed earlier every night? Have I been sleeping later? Has Tyler been in charge longer and l
In this case, Crick's marital status is omitted because it has nothing to do with the article. Why do you want to know? If the article was about you, would you want the world to know that you are single/married?
Most news organizations consider the practice archaic and dropped it years ago. They use full name on first reference (Bill Gates) and just the last name one subsequent reference (Gates).
Whenever was the Web an *innocent place*? 1995: already gilded by time.
illegitimii non ingravare
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'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.
Sometimes you gotta wonder, really...
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
What's next? Pudge on John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"? CmdrTaco dissecting "A History Of Sexuality"? The intersection of academe and Slashdot is too terrible to imagine ...
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
But why should marital status be known right away? This implies that some people cannot have a non-sexual conversation unless it is explicitly forbidden. And what to do about the polyamourous?
You have read Douglas Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language? Cured my thinking that the issue didn't matter. Although in today's economy I wouldn't necessarily mind a title which let potential employers know I'm available. We just need a race-neutral word. Hi, I'm Nrs. Geekotourist!
I am going to start boycotting NYT by refusing to visit their site and bad mouthing them at every opportunity..... oh wait..... I already do that......
- HeXa
But beware of date and relevency ordered search results... ;^).
... etc. etc. ...unless you want it to become a matter of public record.
Try searching for "terry lambert" on google. You will find ~17,600 entries.
My God! What happened to the other 4/5ths?!?
Actually, fully 5% of that is probably some other "Terry Lambert", and not me... 8-).
As a general rule to live by, never send a "letter to the editor", never send an email, never keep (or even *create* in the first place) a file, never make a posting to a news group or a message board, never post your resume, never post your job history, never criticise the company you work for or your managers, never put useless or derogatory comments in your source code, never
If you are a jerk in private email, but nice in public email, expect that people will eventually know your true face, even if no one every intentionally "violates nettiquite".
-- Terry
The article raises valid points about the lack of privacy on the net. Yet it is technicaly lacking. It should inform people that it is possible to be annonymous on the net. It is also possible with the help of public key encryption to make sure that nobody can impersonate you, while being completely annonymous.
What i dont like about the article is that it scares people with technology without telling them that the technology does offer a way to solve their problems.
A couple of weeks ago I entered my name on google and found that it accurately noted my current address, current telephone, and listed things such as my obnoxiously pretentious postings to a cyberpunk mailing list in the early 90's, advice on how to properly use cu-seeme for an early porn reflector, a couple of rather graphically violent short stories published in someone else's zine, and the random, near-libelous kvetching of an ex who thought of many interesting and practical uses for my still twitching corpse. A couple of small and slightly embarrassing appearances I made in the national media were also noted.
I really have no control over the appearance of any of the above. My name is relatively unique and therefore almost everything from google was definitely originating from me or was about me; my mailing list postings which can be definitely tracked were from my uni days when I was required to have my real name on the net account.
I'm not necessarily bothered by the presence of any of this data. I've asked that my address be removed and it seems as if it has. Any employer or potential partner, who is going to hold my ten year old musings against me, can kindly piss off and I hope they will enjoy an early demise. However, I can certainly understand how some of the article's subjects would feel a great fear and paranoia, especially when they have no control over their appearance on random petitions or various articles.
Google is a double-edged sword and I certainly don't hold their unease against them. Life has certainly been made much easier for stalkers and your office's gossip and that is not necessarily a good thing, despite all the other extraordinary benefits of Google.
I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite; I confess I used Google to verify that my current gf wasn't Republican, a copyright lawyer, or an escaped ax murderer. Two out of three wasn't a bad result even though the chainsaws have to be kept under lock and key at all times.
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.
It doesn't work for me in Konq, so I log in as 10101/10101. Does it work for anyone else, or did the NYT catch on?
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
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
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.
"You can't remove pieces of yourself from the Web," Ms. Crick said.
You can always request to remove index and cache from Google, provided that you owned the original.
But it's already too late, in a brief moment after you chose to feature your shiny story in NYT, cool dudes around the world has already mirrored everything about you. Sweetie.
Of my name, there exist several variations, and few have the same as I. My last name is also not common.
I come from a *realy* small country (less that 1/2 million people) and one letter in my first name only exists in my native language..
Needless to say, I am the only person in the world that has this combination of first/last name..
And yes, Google serves as my diary ;-)
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
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.
...just change your name by deed poll to something common, like "John Smith" or "Jim Brown". They'll never be able to tie anything to you then"
Off-topic?! Does that moderator bother to read the story before moderate?
Read the damn story and see who is Camberley Crick, and what is Timmy the Turtle.
Damn, some moderators today even worse that trolls, who post before reading, now they moderate before reading the damn article.
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.
Some months back I made a database of information available to the public. I did this because the person who controlled the yahoo-group where the info came from decided to take it offline and make it a paid service. I took exception to making information freely given into a commercial product.
The information contained reviews of translation agencies (basically, how long did they take to pay for services - the translation industry is notorious for not paying). Each submission required the real name of the person who posted the data. This was to prevent someone from anonymously libeling a company.
When I made the data public, a small, but extremely vocal group made all kinds of legal threats because I had posted their "personal" information (one cheese-eating surrender monkey threatened to hire a Parisian lawyer and toss me in jail - yeah, right). For some reason these idiots felt their names, business addresses, business phone numbers, and business email addresses were somehow private.
I googled a handful of the loudest complainers just to see the results. Not only did I find their business contact information, but I also found some interesting other tidbits such as home addresses and phone numbers, CVs, school projects, and more.
I took the data offline, but not because of the legal threats. They had no legal weight. My limited bandwidth, however, was screaming in agony from the large number of hits from the people who appreciated me making the data available. I had experienced a mini-slashdotting. I hope I never experience the real thing.
I did learn one thing. People will go to unusual lengths to convince themselves that information posted on the internet is private.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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?
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
What I find more disturbing is that she has taken it upon herself to try to teach others about computer/Internet/OS platforms.
Because I don't want some stupid marketer to know everything about me. And because I don't want to lose a job just because some idiot HR person is able to type my real name into google and come up with my honest appraisal of the intelligence of my former, or current, boss. See my Slashdot journal for more information.
See the article in the NYT: you'll find exactly the reasons why I want to keep a certain degree of privacy.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
"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
And consider writing something in a mailing list a publication too. A lot of mailing lists have archives in the strangest places.. sometimes because someone sets up an archive for private use but forgets to block that archive from prying eyes (and I don't mean blocking by not linking to it or putting a robots.txt there, but blocking with a good .htaccess file).
The best sample was when I did a websearch for my own name and found that someone had a web-archive of all private mail, including stuff I exchanged with him. Found some interesting bits there.. the archive is now gone.
I got reactions about my homepage that I am very open. I still limit what I write there to stuff that I want friends / enemies / employers to see.
And employers will see stuff. Some manager with way too much time on her/his hands might stumble on some page where you declare that you don't like stupid managers bugging you during the day and start whining at your boss. (been there, done that)
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
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.
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.
My university results for certain classes are publicized on a professors page, he has a webpage for each class each year.
Somehow this page ends up in google and google-cache.
I guess it's linked from his regular site.
Is this knowledge that should be known to anyone else on the internet than the people that are into that class? I don't think so. I never asked to put these results on the net in the first place.
But you see, you can be using nicknames and aliases in your net-existance, but still sensitive information about yourself can get in the public in ways simular to this.
Note: no, I didn't fail that class.
The New York Times, company of which owns them, the Boston Globe, 21 regional newspapers, The New York Times syndicate, nine television and radio stations, three magazines, and fifty percent of the International Tribune - attacks search engines to prevent you from looking for information.
Given all the evidence (partly stated), I believe they do this to prevent criticism about them and their Corporate 'friends' on the Internet - and your ability to find things on them using search engines.
How can that be off topic?
And I mean that in the old fashioned /. sense. How many of them were there back when those of us who used the net lived off of .plan, .profile, gopher, archie, veronica, jughead, pine, tin, nn, etc. (and watched or helped many of them emerge).
In 1993 who would have thought a question posted to alt.personals.bondage would have been stored in a giant database and saved for the world to access almost a decade later? Who would have cared?
At the time the debate over privacy centered around the existance of anon.penet.fi (and later Dick Depew's incredible failure when he took matters into his own hands).To come out now and say that we should have always been careful is like telling someone they should have had an airbag in their 1930 Buick. The reasons for privacy then were much different and the popular belief was that privacy wasn't needed by the average net user.
This is one of the issues the internet community has completely flip/flopped around on. Failure to realize that is basicly putting a big blind spot into how this situation has come about. The net went from a trusted space to an untrustworthy space rather quickly, and it's a little late to undo everything we did back then.
No Zen is good zen
Here are some classic tidbits:
"Julf's anonymous server seems to me to be contributing to the erosion of civility and responsibility that have been the hallmarks of the more traditional parts of USENET. More than that, Julf has refused to even discuss a compromise to his position that all hierarchies should be open, by default, to his server."
"There shouldn't be much controversy over this, but there will be anyhow. :-)"
"Though I disagree with Depews actions, he stood up and took the heat. an8785 engaged in an act of moral cowardice, and is now hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Previously my opinion was that the an8785 should simply be disabled. Given that an8785 has actively urged people to take actions to harm Depew and refused to adequately reverse those actions, I now think an8785 should be unmasked. Should Depew come to actual harm, the anonymous service might find itself in interesting waters."
"I disagree. an8785 did what s/he felt was necessary, and voicing one's opinions (even anonymously) is the better path than not doing so."
"In other words, anonymous servers with inadequate safegards protect law-breakers from the consequences of their actions. *That* is what I oppose."
Read the discussion. Note the use of REAL NAMES in almost every instance. Note the baseline belief differences between the admins of yesteryear and the admins of today. Privacy, as we define it today, was almost unthinkable then. And unless we remember that, blaming the people who behaved in one way a decade ago for not conforming to modern standards is not only a disservice, but a complete denial of how much we have changed.
No Zen is good zen
that many people are confusing privacy with anonimity. If you want to have privacy, don't go to a public place. If you want your information private, don't post it on a website.
Evil is the money of root.
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)
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.
You were an adult. It's a public forum. The exercise of free speech has consequences.
It's not "a real issue" in the sense that your writings should be handled in any other way. I'm disappointed that google is willing to delete records from the only usenet archive at the author's request. This is like the NYT being willing to remove from their archives a published letter to the editor.
It looks very much like a filler article to me and not something that warrants serious study.
/. editors actually read the articles that are referenced before posting the pieces?
However, the articel doesn't specifically blame google as the poster claims and seems to have a go at privacy in the age of the web in general. I should perhaps ask here if
robots.txt
If you don't want your information on the web, either keep it off, or tell the engines not to index you with meta tags or robots.txt
You have prosted information with no restrictions so that ANYONE in the world can view it..... what the hell did you expect?
I wish that article had been out just a little while longer so I could post a link to the Google cached version of it. I'll have to bide my time, I guess.
Have we become a society where a woman's marital status is something to be hidden?
No, but we have become a society where a woman is something more than either married (Mrs.) or searching for a husband (Miss). In most contexts marital status doesn't matter. Hence Ms.
By the way, Ms. (or something that sounds just like it) was in common use at my grade school as early as 1960 - long before you'd see it in print anywhere. We kids didn't _care_ whether the substitute teacher was Miss Paine (say) or Mrs. Paine, so we'd forget which it was, and cover by a slurred pronounciation - "mizz".
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.
Go, have fun, Ego Surf on google for half an hour. It is an eye opening experience.
I easily was able to find information on Camberley Crick. Here is the story she was squaking about, available via google's cache. She also wrote this little java-based word game. In fact, she seems to be a sort of expert on word games, as evidenced by this first and only post on USENET.
Note: some of these dynamic links won't work, if you really want to, go and find all about this woman's sad life if you want. However, what is funny to me is that now this woman still has all this personal information on the internet, and she also now has an article on the NYT web site about how she hates it (available to the world of course, WITH her name)! HAH!
Some people are just plain dumb I guess. It's like publishing a book and then complaining your privacy has been violated when people read it.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
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.
My name (not an uncommon one at all) got 1660 hits on Google. (And this is with quote marks "Mark Moss" so it will only find pages where both names are together - not studies of primitive plants by someone named Mark) My name plus the small village where I live got 9 hits - 8 of them aren't relevant, but the very first one appears to be a telephone book listing. Of course, your phone # and address never have been private unless you paid the little extra to keep it unlisted. Nowadays, I'm not sure even that is sufficient anymore, since one leak and one post to the web and the info is out there forever. I hope you can sue the phone company for $1M when they screwrf up. If you're really worried, you can buy a cell phone for cash, and then you buy codes that add minutes to the account as needed. But I don't know if you could get any sort of land line for your modem anonymously.
I also checked on my sister; name and city got 9 hits, 8 of them are either things she put on the web or articles she wrote in a brief newspaper job. One is a birth announcement for someone else with the same name - and in the same city. Apparently her phone company doesn't put it's directory on the web. So you can find out that she hates Bob Dylan and knows enough medieval history to very wittily pan the latest Joan of Arc movie, but not name, address, or phone number.
My two children (adults and living away from home): names plus towns give no hits. Names alone: 342 hits for my daughter's name; the first ten aren't her, and since she's never been active on the internet and doesn't currently have a phone in her name, it's likely that none are her. 3 hits for my son's name (the first name is not so common); two of them I'm sure are not him (a list of the colonial families of Philadelphia, a referee at a college game), one is someone I never heard of looking for a long list of people, so it's probably not a reference to him but I don't know for sure.
This is an overreaction on a Slashdot editor's part. The article isn't blaming Google for anything, unless you have a personal agenda that you're constantly looking to whip out. The article is actually about social changes brought on by being able to do web searches about a specific person. Many Slashdotters should be thinking about this. If I received someone's resume, I'd certainly run some searches. And if I found out they were a ranting Linux loon, they'd get the boot.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
"If you do not want a thing heard, do not say it." The amended version might be, "If you do not want a thing heard, do not say it online." I think most of the people named in this article (with the possible exception of the Palestinian guy, who's liable, in this political climate, to be dumped on no matter what he says) are just clueless and don't realize the way the medium works.
Folks, you know and I know that if you put something online, it's there, and it's going to stay there, and people can find it. I still get the odd e-mail from someone (reforwarded endlessly to chase my morphing e-mail addresses) about my first shitty website that I built in 1997 or so.
On the other hand, I'm not carping or whining about it like the people in this article. Yes, I hold some pretty, uh, interesting political views, but if I weren't willing to stand up for my views, what kind of person would I be? (Oh, yeah, a parlour-political whiner like most people.) Maybe they've cost me some jobs, or other opportunities. Ok. That was a choice I made, and I have to live with it. (Besides, if they didn't like my politics, would I really want to work there?
So I guess it all comes down to that: Say only that which you want heard, and if you're too chickenshit to say what you really feel (because it might ruin your life or something), then I guess you have to examine your beliefs (and/or the state of your life). On the other hand, bitching about your loss of privacy as an identified source in the (inter)national press (and a known Paper of Record, too) is hardly likely to get you any accolades from me, except "Hypocrite."
Whoo! That was much more vitriolic than I had intended...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
[shrugs] Hell, if I were going to market myself as a porn starlet, I'd choose a name just like that...kinda Vassar-y in an amoral sort of way, or something.
Getting away from the porn angle, what is it with these people's parents and their bright ideas for naming their kids anyway? (I pity the next generation, where everyone's classes will have three Tuckers, a Fisher, and a Taylor, 4/5ths of whom will be girls, choose any four.)
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I EgoSurf every now and again just to see what turns up. The list has remained fairly constant for a while now. Mostly harmless work-related technical discussions plus a few articles I wrote back in college. However, this story made me recheck my search results and I was amazed to discover that they have changed quite drastically recently. Either the search engines have become more sophisticated or a lot of sites have recently opened themselves up to the bots.
There's a bunch of stuff from 5-6 years ago that was never linked until now. Most shocking is the fact that the #3 hit on my name is a posting which implies that I am a Nazi sympathizer. It was always there before, but suddenly someone (who was defending me) linked to it and it zipped up to the top of the Google rankings.
Plus it looks like the search engines have started doing substring matching within e-mail addresses. A somewhat embarrassing e-mail that I sent a long time ago recently surfaced. I didn't include my name, but it was a substring of the e-mail address I used at the time.
Another amusing discovery is the fact that "legitimate" news sites have referenced my work. Back in college when I wanted to write a story about something, I would search the web to gather a lot of information about that topic. Then I would take that research and use it to write a story with my own personal slant. But now I have become "so-and-so's biggest critic" by a "professional" news site that obviously uses the same technique of researching stories.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
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.
Um, just why exactly *should* you know a woman's marital status? Or is that the only reason you talk to women, for courting purposes?
Do you tell all people you meet (not just women, there are some men who might be interested in dating you) your marital status when you first meet? "Hi, my name is Joe, and I'm currently married, but unhappily, so if you'd like to have sex sometime, I'll all for it".
A woman can always tell you if she's married if she so chooses. There's also that little Western tradition of wearing a gold band on your left ring-finger. But how on Earth is it relevant when you're reading a newspaper article about someone you've never met, and probably will never meet?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
It is amazing seeing how the slashbots really come out and rip on somebody based on a cursory reading (or none at all) of an article. Camberley was a CS major in college. She isn't an idiot - she knows that you can request to have pages removed from the Google cache (if you were the original author of said work - not just if your name is used).
She also isn't "shocked" to discover that information put on the web is effectively public information. But like all of us who've had web presences dating back many years now, we were less concerned what we put online 5-6 years ago when the Internet felt like a smaller more tightly knit community. Furthermore, I didn't consider when I was 14-15 years old that my Usenet postings and strange online rants might still be around to haunt me 8-10 years later as a businessman engaged in a moderately serious attempt at a career.
I think we all know that Google and the Google cache does us a great service by keeping information around even after hosting fees have stop being paid or frustrated maintainers of web sites get sick of the responsibility. And that it's great that we can find information about ourselves on Google, and thereby know what others are likely to think about us as a first web-based impression.
But the common person (non-geek) doesn't necessarily realize the persistence and easy accessibility of informatiion on the web - hell, most people I see don't really know how to properly use a search engine, including many of the professional programmers that have worked on my teams (and they are amazed when I'm able to rapidly dig up tons of information).
In no way did this article read like a condemnation of search engines to me, just a piece pointing out the human interest aspect of how search engines can change first impressions, a warning to the non-uber-geeks to be wary of what they place on the web and the persistence of web-based information.
Technically this isn't a panopticon. A panopticon was a structure meant to allow a central authority (like a jail warden or teacher) to view and be viewed by the populus (like inmates or students) without letting the populus view each other. The populus was isolated in individual cells, precluding contact with one another, and have an open side pointing to the panopticon's focal point.
A more apt technological analogy to the panopticon is the TV industry where people get a full view of a central source, yet are isolated from seeing each other in their own homes.
Google could be considered more like a panopticon with a large mirror in the middle of the building, but that directly violates the purpose of the panopticon in the first place.
I can't access the article unless I allow the New York Times to place access-tracking cookies on my system.
A few days later, I remove the billboard. Do I have the right to demand all those photos be given back since I no longer have the billboard up?
If those photos were published in a magazine, my personal information will stay forever with all those people who archive the magazine or collect it. Did the magazine violate my privacy?
More importantly, if I put my personal information on a billboard, is it really personal info that is entitled to privacy?
I'm sure there are thousands of copies of Pamela and Tommy Lee all around the world today. It is deeply personal stuff, but who is to blame? The people who have it today or the people who released it to the public (themselves)?
BTW: I don't know what a troll is, but I am just asking some questions!
All your favorite sites in one place!
I see post after post after post saying "Well, GEE, it's your fault for putting that information up on the web in the first place". The writeup takes a similarly sarcastic and snide tone.
THAT'S NOT WHAT THIS IS ABOUT.
Did you read the whole article? What about that lady whose name and email address was used to post racist messages? What can she do about that? NOTHING! I think the larger issue here is that information about you, which may not even be accurate or from you, may be perceived as such. And that is a troubling prospect. Welcome to 21st century slander and prejudice.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
And this doesn't even touch the issue of whether the search results for the name of the applicant actually are valid for the person applying for the job. Even if they are 100 percent accurate, they are illegal.
My knowledge of law about this is from WA, but even if other states have different laws the same moral principle applies. If you think Google searches in this context are OK, I really would like to know your reasoning.
Right. And after the NYT misquotes you or says something incorrect about you on the front page, they bury a little retraction a week later...
When someone is researching a newspaper database or browsing the microfilm at the library, after seeing the headline "John Smith Has Intercourse With Small Farm Animals" are they going to dig through to search for a retraction?
I don't know that the NY Times is attacking Google or any of the search engines so much as making a point about how a gradual erosion of personal privacy is taking place because of the net.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Once you enter data into the web it can never be removed.
First, let's presume that at least one strength of the internet lies in its ability to bring together groups of like-minded individuals in the form of online communities. Second, let's presume that because of its ability to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas, it is also a forum for discussing these ideas - whether in support of, or in opposition to, a particular idea. Third, let's draw an analogy between meeting up with someone in real life - say, a couple of friends at a local coffeehouse. You sit down, and a debate about something controversial ensues. For all intents and purposes, your words will not go beyond this little discussion group. The strength here is that you get to walk away with, and think about what has been said to you, just as your friends can consider what you have said. That's where it ends.
Now - picture trying something like this on the net. If you say anything that has your name attached to it, more often that not, it can be easily recalled through a search engine. I suspect that the notion of posting under one's real name will come to a screeching halt. The irony is almost amusing, as there are those who advocate a transparent society, but there is simply too much risk associated with exposing one's identity.
I've personally was a regular participant in a handfull of newsgroups several years ago, LONG before anyone had even an inkling that these posts might be retained - and searchable no less. I believe they're still available for anyone to see. Let's say I go and apply for a job, my prospective employer does a little checking, and sees that the opinions I've expressed AT THAT TIME do not coincide with their personal beliefs. My application gets round-filed, I'm not given the opportunity to defend myself, and I have no idea that this just happened.
I see this leading to a schizophrenic, even paranoid society. It provides ample opportunity for anyone to seek that little tidbit of information about someone (accurate or not), that could be used to wreak havoc - even covertly.
While some may say that it moves us back to the time when everyone in the village knew who you were, I think an important distinction is in order. I have the option to leave a village. With the internet, however, no matter where I move, the information is still there. Anyone can know me based on what they find on the net, whether or not it is accurate. Is this really a good thing?
There was a program that would do this, it let users annotate web pages and let multiple users with the same software see each other's annotations and have mini-forums at any given site.
So of course they got sued, for copyright violation I think, as if writing in the margins of a books you own is a violation, or writing on post-it notes and returning those to the library with a book to get other people's comments.