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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.
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
Looks like they've found a way to block that thing.
I just created an account with the username slashd0rk / password cheese
feel free to use it
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pants ahoy
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
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.