NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Our Responsibilities on the Web That Never Forgets
Our Responsibilities on the Web That Never Forgets
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000734.html
Greetings. The New York Times has published an important article on
the subject of the Net's long memory, and the impacts on reputations
and other aspects of people's lives when previously posted materials
exist essentially forever online ( http://bit.ly/csYKDa ).
Regular readers know (all too well!) my frequent comment that we must
always assume that anything publicly posted on the Net may be
permanent, despite attempts to expunge or ignore any particular data
later on.
The Times article makes a number of good points, but also in my
opinion downplays some key realities and confuses some important
aspects of the issues in some cases.
The concept of passing laws to prevent employers from using publicly
posted information (e.g. Facebook pages) in their employment decisions
seems effectively meaningless. One way or another, those searches
will be done and those pages seen, and if necessary some other reason
will be cited for the decline of particular applicants.
The idea of self-destructing data implicitly assumes that all public
copies of the public data in question are also deleted, and that all
involved entities (in various countries) would even respond to data
deletion requests or demands. While deleting data from the most
widely seen repositories might reduce its impact for a time, the odds
are that it could still be found on other servers and would eventually
find its way back into primary search engines again at some point as
Net site crawling proceeds.
The article seems to confuse the concept of deleting public data with
(their example) Google's anonymizing of log data after a specified
period of time. The former is explicitly public data, the latter
explicitly private without copies in public view. The two cases are
entirely dissimilar. That log data can be anonymized says nothing
about the ability to effectively delete publicly available data.
It is disturbing that people are paying significant -- sometimes very
large -- sums of money to third parties in an attempt to "game" Google
search results to push "negative" links toward the back of results
listings. I do continue to feel that some mechanism to help in
situations of egregiously false information would be useful. Several
years ago I discussed this -- in terms of concepts to think about, not
a specific proposal -- in "Extending Google Blacklists for Dispute
Resolutions" ( http://bit.ly/c4RvWs ).
Decades ago, when the Internet (then ARPANET) was new, I started
participating in and helping to develop the then novel concept of
public discussion mailing lists, many of which were archived in one
form or another even way back then, and the discussions from which in
many cases remain online today. I still receive new comments
responding to what I wrote on those lists so long ago that new
generations of Internet users have discovered.
Yet I remember being conscious even at the time of the likely
"permanence" of what I was writing. I distinctly recall saying to a
colleague who inquired about this "new-fangled" mailing list stuff
that it was useful and fun, but that he'd better assume that anything
he sent to those lists might be around forever. He sort of chuckled
at my suggestion.
And therein may be a key to these dilemmas. On one hand, individuals
need to understand -- from a very young age indeed -- that (just like
how you don't want to stick your hand into an open flame) what you
post publicly (or even just to your "friends") may well be permanent,
and that discretion is indeed the better part of valor in some
situations on the Net.
This doesn't directly help in those cases where someone else posts
damaging false information -- some sort of dispute resolution
mechanisms as mentioned above may ultimately have some role to play in
that respect.
But fundamentally, nobody puts a gun to your head and forces you to
post personal goodies to Facebook or anywhere else. Peer pressure has
always existed and has ruined many lives over time, but as adults the
ultimate responsibility has to be our own, not just for ourselves but
also for our children who are too young to understand the potentially
lifetime ramifications of what they do and say online.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
Co-Founder, PFIR (People For Internet Responsibility): http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad (Network Neutrality Squad): http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP (Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance):
http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Google Buzz: http://bit.ly/lauren-buzz