School newspaper archives go online, embarrassing student writing and shenanigans become permanent record
As the papers have begun digitizing their back issues, their Web sites have become the latest front in the battle over online identities. Youthful activities that once would have disappeared into the recesses of a campus library are now preserved on the public record, to be viewed with skeptical eyes by an adult world of colleagues and potential employers. Alumni now in that world are contacting newspapers with requests for redaction. For unlike Facebook profiles -- that other notable source of young-adult embarrassment -- the ability to remove or edit questionable content in these cases is out of the author's hands.Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites (via /.)When Terrence J. Casey, then the Collegian's editor, got Ms. Dobo's request, he referred to a policy put in place by previous editors: The Daily Collegian does not remove any editorial content from its Web site. However, if there is a factual inaccuracy in a story, the editors will run a correction or an update as needed.
Lyle, a graduate of Emory University who asked that his last name be withheld because he is in the military, got pretty much the same response from The Emory Wheel, where he served as opinion editor for three years before graduating in 2005 and joining the Marine Corps. Lyle had sounded off on domestic politics, the wars, and economic policy in a column that is preserved in the paper's Web archives. "If any of my Marines were to end up Googling me, I'd feel uncomfortable with them knowing my own politics," he said. "As a rule, politics and the military don't mix."
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Pretty soon enough people will have something about them online that judgmental types would care about that a social breaking point will be reached. On that day, those who have something private online (the exposed people) will just start to give and get jobs only to each other, because they have empathy and don't judge all the others in their glass houses. And if a nonexposed person wants a job with an exposed organization, they'll have to put something private online first!
Um... what does published works have to do with privacy?
Wait, you mean someone's published activities, distributed in a public space may follow them?
Heaven forefend!
Maybe this is a generation gap thing- I've never had the expectation that anything I did or said would be forgotten.
shenanigans!
It's not a generation gap thing. People don't like embarrassing things about them being on the Internet.
As a sysadmin at a daily paper, I occasionally recover emails from our spam filter threatening litigation unless we remove this or that piece of court record from our website. I've been told by the editors to whom I forward said emails that this is extremely common behavior.
In short, not just college papers.
How exactly is archiving a publication, even a school newspaper a breach of privacy?
Regardless of what some people think, you can't really unpublish something in the real world.
I'm sorry, but if you published something then that's it. If you don't agree with your earlier opinion you can say so. If you said something dumb then acknowledge it. I've said quite a bit of dumb things all over the internet. And I'm confident that there are things I think were clever ideas now that will seem idiotic to me in a decade Unfortunately I don't know which ideas those are. That's the way the world works.
There are also some pretty inaccurate, nasty accusations about me floating around the internet. That's a far more substantial worry.
But in both situations one can explain to people everything that is relevant.
The Marine case makes very little sense. If politics and the military don't mix, why are his fellow Marines googling him?
Overall, this isn't a breach of privacy. This is simply making things that were deliberately made public and making them more easily locatable.
No one's saying that it's illegal to publish this stuff -- but that it's unexpected. People create media in one era of technology whose scope of disclosure is limited by that technology. Another technology comes along and vastly increases the scope of disclosure and creates a rupture. This isn't a question of "what should we do" but rather, "Holy shit, did you notice this was happening, and man, where will it strike next?"
This is just a simple extension of the "information wants to be free" paradigm. Only now, with more archiving and the advent of better scanning and OCR technologies, old information wants to be free, as well.
I'm a huge privacy advocate, supporting member of the EFF, etc. But I'm not sure that this is such a Bad Thing. In the case of school newspapers, it's certainly nothing that an investigative journalist with time on his/her hands couldn't have uncovered. This just makes it simpler.
Anything you do in print should be ASSUMED will be out there forever and may come back and haunt you. Regrets of these publications are either an irrelevant outdated piece of your past, or something you shouldn't have written.
A person's opinions and attitudes generally shift with time. It's ok to not be the person you were, just be self-assured enough to adequately explain the person you are today.
I have to agree with T3KNOMANSER, this is absolutely not a "privacy rupture" **coughOVERWROUGHTcough**. These were articles which were willingly published and distributed to a public audience. Look, your reputation follows you in big and small ways irrespective of the Net. It's really ok to have been the person you were and the person you are now. Always work towards being a better citizen and you'll be just fine.
As a former high school journalist, I was considering posting my thoughts about this "privacy rupture", but then decided that I didn't want to share them with the world.
That is how it works, this is how it always worked.
It's not a "privacy rupture" to take obscure public information and make it easier to access. I'm used to hearing this fallacy from technophobes, but I wasn't expecting it from Cory.
This trend is unavoidable, irreversible, and just getting started. Accept the future, make peace with your past, and stop acting surprised!
Drew, how is the concept of "rupture" incompatible with the concept of "unavoidable" or "irreversible?"
The Industrial Revolution contained many "unavoidable, irreversible" changes that remade the landscape, upended lives, made and destroyed fortunes... Rupture, in other words.
The only knees jerking here are the people who assume that writing about something as important and unpleasant is the same as condemning it or asking for it to change.
Kind of like when my coworkers found my 7th Grade yearbook photo.
You know the one -- big nerdy tortoise shell glasses, way-too feathered hair, white jean jacket with the collar turned up like Elvis... ugh.
ummm... nothing to see here folks. Move along.
http://xkcd.com/137/
"When did we forget our dreams?"
Ya? i used to organize a rilly big pot rally in a major american city.
Of course, my usenet drivel drowns out the pot signal in search results...so people googling me think i'm not just an ex pothead but a moron ex pothead...
srsly: One needs to own one's past, stupid, heroic, criminal, brave or foolish and misguided as it may have been. The greater, longitudinal, consequences for society is that we will morph into a grey goo of conformist drones hewing to an orthodoxy from childhood. Imagine a nation of people raised to worry about The Best College from the day they were born. Live your life.
also, a healthy dose of "ya, i did/said/wrote it, and F--- You!" might be indicated.
Ridiculous. Another symptom of a society infantalizing young adults and not holding them responsible for their behaviours.
I think that society will start progressing towards a point of not really caring about what you wrote in your earlier, teenage years, as the crowd that populated shameful forums and social networks slowly grows up.
These people have grown with a different idea of privacy, knowing full well the futility of taking something off the internet and that practically everyone had their own little dark age of embarrassment.
Akin to that collective facepalm that everyone does when they see old pictures of themselves in the 70's, with the ridiculous fashion. "What were we thinking?" and laugh it off.
Which in turn brings us an idea of a person as a fluctuating individual, that changes and matures. But most importantly, that privacy has changed to become into something were the simple deluge of trivial data is not of interest to anyone. Perhaps we will be less judgmental when hiding skeletons in your closet is practically impossible.
Cory,
ya sure, but it'd not either of those things.
I was painfully self-conscious about the weird, bad fiction I wrote for my high school literary mag from the moment the words hit the page. But I took the leap and I stood by it - and still stand by it.
I'm not telling other people that they should feel the same way. I'm just saying that nothing's changed - it is no more important nor unpleasant than it ever was.
Lyle, a graduate of Emory University who asked that his last name be withheld because he is in the military, got pretty much the same response from The Emory Wheel, where he served as opinion editor for three years before graduating in 2005 and joining the Marine Corps.
So Lyle is so concerned with hiding what he's written from his fellow Marines that he asked his last name be withheld. But he gives enough information that it took about 3 minutes to find his past columns.
Which are interesting in themselves, because with columns like "Emory's liberals are blinded by anti-Americanism" and "Anti-war protesters fail to offer vision, play the America blame-game instead", the assumption would be they'd play well among Marines. Guess these days, that might be a bad assumption.
Or maybe he's embarrassed because his writing stinks. Content aside, his ability to string words together is horrible.
Eventually so much information will be on the internet that the signal to noise ratio will be so low that it won't matter. Yeah, the fact that you got busted for a fake-id 20 years ago will be there, but so will the fact that you went to a family reunion in 2004 and 2006 and 2010 and 2015 and that you sold a car in 2005 and that you wrote a book report in 3rd grade about Number the Stars, etc., etc.. No one will be able to find harmful information to use against you, and besides, they'll have plenty of harmful information out there anyways.
back to the idea of creating and holding multiple identities for your children so they always have a clean one to fall back on.
So, what percentage here know who Temujin was, without looking it up?
I didn't realize Google Groups meant the contents of USENET until a few years back, when during a quick egosearch I found stuff I signed with my real name in groups about Magic the Gathering and video games and whatnot. Oh, circa-1996-younger self, you just didn't know what the internet truly was, did you.
Yes, the industrial revolution ruined all of our lives. Except for that whole "I can afford clothes and books" thing, it was a complete failure.
Oh, and glass. I prefer it to, say, animal horn or moldy leather for use as a drinking vessel. It's tough to make photo voltaic material from leather, too. (well, you know, toughER)
So, Cory, is it safe to assume that you are proponent of logging? Because, I mean, we will totally upend the lives of the loggers when we stop using trees for paper. And what about the folks that make their living in the oil field? How about the hundreds of thousands that are involved in the supply chain that leads up to your arch-nemesis, the (dum, dum, DUUUUUM) Closed Circuit Camera?
I mean really, when the population gets to a certain size, there is quite literally NOTHING you can do that will not upset a percentage of that population. The larger the population, the larger the number of people it will cheese off.
I had shite rained down upon me yesterday for mentioning that I 'adopted' a rescue dog. I was told that it "completely devastates" the lives of adopted children to use that term for animals, regardless of the fact that it is the correct usage of the word. She strongly suggested that I use the term 'sponsored'. Wow. Really? I had a couple of strong suggestions for her, as well.
That said, at what point do we stop the censorship?!? Who gets to decide what is public and what is not? Assumably, anything that is considered 'public record' like criminal activity, and stupid essays written for college newspapers falls into this category.
And at what point do we decide to stop making it into a bigger deal than it is? It's a NEWSPAPER for God's sake. PUBLICation. It's almost like it's even in the word or something.
Here's an idea; if you don't want people to know that you are a complete idiot, don't act like one. Heaven forbid that some of the asinine, ridiculous things we find online ever be used as a lesson against "What is not acceptable to publish if you still wish to maintain a public life."
Well Cory, before this post I can say that I didn't care for what you wrote back then but now, seeing your reaction, I WANT to read it! LOL
Seriously, I wouldn't have the time; I suppose that it will be the case for anyone who hadn't a special interest in reading them before they went online.
I see no great rupture: it always has been quite easy to learn most anything one wants about anyone else. Those writings were always of public record.
My son worked on his high school newsletter all four years. They did an article where they asked fellow students to share their deep secrets. A few confessed to having some degree of sex on campus, some admitted to having smoked dope on campus.
When it was published, the paper was shut down and the teacher was fired.
I've had some arguments with Edward Hasbrouck about this, and I continue to believe that this expectation was entirely unreasonable.
Of course USENET was being archived! Why wouldn't it be? Even I kept a personal archive of the newsgroups I subscribed to.
I'm far far more shocked when mailing lists aren't archived for eternity, such as SpyKing's Surveillance List or Robert A. Hettinga's Philodox / Shipwright mailing lists.
I also have an archive of practically every email I've ever received or sent (including mailing lists) since 1993. (By the way, MUA authors suck at keeping stable mbox formats across different clients across time. And it's virtually impossible to keep header information preserved, besides To/From/Subject.) Not to mention archiving every instant message and IRC channel I've participated in.
Now if only Apple Spotlight didn't completely choke on actually being able to search the totality of MyLifeBits (so to speak).
(Apple so far sucks at software development for personal data collections. It's very easy to hit a crippling software barrier for email stored in Mail.app, for addresses stored in Address Book.app, for tabs open in Safari.app, for IM windows open in iChat.app, for MP3s stored in the iTunes database, and so on.)
p.s. You also realize that every Google search is logged and archived forever, including all metadata such as time, location, frequency, etc. right? (Don't like that? Use a distributed search engine such as YaCy.)
You realize that practically everything you transmit over the Internet is being logged and recorded by Carnivore / Narus Insight / some other DPI software?
There's good reasons why normal people use strong cryptography onion routers such as TOR and I2P.
The problem is not that stuff you wrote when you were young gets published on the Internet. The problem is that you feel embarrased about it.
So the source of the problem lies within you, and not out there.
The key to real freedom is to not care about it.
Solution: Ostrich Syndrome
I'm with those who don't get how it's an invasion of privacy to archive published works. I thought Boing Boing was all crazy about making published information as free, open and accessible as possible? How does this jibe with BB's anti-establishment vibe on copyright?
If you're in high school or college and you don't know that a newspaper is a distributable published media then I'm pretty sure you haven't figured out the Internet either, so I wouldn't worry about embarrassment.
On the other hand,in a generation or so, once *everybody's* shameful past can be googled, we may all find ourselves much more tolerant of other peoples' gaffes.
Slizzered,
Well on our way to David Brin's Transparent Society?
or you could self-assassinate your own on-line character by anonymously posting thousands of spurious and specious (spurspecious? spesprious?) items so you have an alibi for anything.
This also works with posting your Social Security Number online.
While, in general I do feel that once you publish something it's out there for all to see, I do sympathize with folks who end up getting an unpleasant surprise to see that something they published in one medium is suddenly (and unexpectedly) available in another.
I don't think this is an issue of privacy as much as author's rights. It's probably a bit naive for someone who's published something in the last 10 years or so to be shocked that it can be found online, but what about those of us who published things before the advent of the internet? I worked in my school newspaper and yearbook (largely as a photographer, but also with a bit of writing) and I don't recall signing any sort of release for any of my work (not to mention the fact that as a minor at the time my parents would have had to be involved in signing any releases).
Even with a release, the current body of law surrounding that would seem to indicate that some of that work might have been licensed only for use in a printed newspaper or yearbook, not necessaryly for publication on the internet. I also wouldn't be surprised if most high schools and even colleges don't have release forms (either because they didn't get them in the first place or because they just don't have them 20-30 years later) for the material they're re-publishing.
So, yeah. It's not as simple as people just whining about things they published long ago being found online.
While this is a surprise, my thinking (however weak it may be) is that everyone is missing the point. If EVERYTHING from the papers is archived on the Internet (in my case the photos), then woo-hoo my high school/college crushes will reappear!
I'll get to see them once again...
"You can destroy what you have written, but you cannot unwrite it." -- Anthony Burgess.
This doesn't seem to be any more of a breech of privacy than, say, Google Books or Project Gutenberg. Those authors may have seen their ideas, beliefs and viewpoints evolve until they contradict their prior published works; because these otherwise obscure works are now so widely accessible, those contradictions could be used to discredit the authors in total.
If you want a free and open body of writing online, this is the natural progression.
I say this as someone who kept an online journal from 1996-2002 before the site went down. My awkward teenage years are forever preserved via the Internet Archive, available to anyone with a bit of Google-fu. It hasn't cost me a job or even come up on the job, but I'm prepared to answer those questions when, and if, the time comes. You have to be able to own what you write as the person you were when you wrote it, and be able to defend not the person you are but the person you've become. This is the very nature of our Information Age.
I'd usually say I'm surprised at Cory and BoingBoing for taking the position of indexing and online archiving of student work as a Bad Thing, but then again, BoingBoing did invent the term "unpublish."
"...Usenet's archives online, the material we thought we'd written in a no-archive medium..."
Hmm. Why does that strike me as rather contradictory? As for Cory's contention that this represents an unexpected transformation from an older technological presentation format, I find that a bit disingenuous. What about LP records? Certainly one can argue that a music label releasing a cd should be cognizant of the possibilities due to a digital format. But music that entered life as an lp and never saw a cd release can still be rather easily converted with all the usual possibilities (the music companies would say abuses)following. They couldn't have expected that, after all.
Bottom line, if you wrote it they'll find it.
Canadian professor denied US entry for taking LSD in 1967
"Vancouver psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar has been barred from entering the United States. The reason? During a random stop-and-search at a US/Canadian border crossing, a Google search of his name led to his article from the Spring 2001 'Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts.' In it Feldmar describes two acid trips he took under the supervision of his graduate advisor in psychology -- in 1967. This turns out to have been enough to earn him a life-time ban under the grounds of 'admitted drug use.'
That's basically the argument Hasbrouck put forward. He felt that he owned the copyright on his USENET posts and he didn't agree to have DejaNews republish them.
But what everyone seems to have failed to recognize, especially when Larry Lessig published Code (juxtapose with Is Copyright Dead on the Net?), is that the Internet is a giant copy machine. Everything sent over the Internet is duplicated hundreds of times, just in the process of transmission. USENET servers are massively mirrored. Search engines wouldn't be possible without indexing and caching.
Copyright infringement is fundamentally necessary for the Internet to work at all. Anyone posting to USENET should have understood this; it's inherent to the medium.
Absent of some i-PATRIOT Act combined with the CALEA, the Internet will always be the wild west as depicted in the writings collected by Peter Ludlow: High Noon on the Electronic Frontier and Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias.
Copyright is dead on the Internet. Only most people still don't realize it yet.
As the maintainer of the Web archive of a printed magazine, I recently "sanitized" the archives at the request of two persons who were afraid to be embarassed by the articles we printed years back.
This happened twice, and in both cases the person in question had been spokesman for the inmates in a prison and had been quoted as criticizing the prison authorities. All well and good, but both persons suddenly, in 2008, found their job security threatened because their employers didn't know they had been in prison, and one of them had a strange name and no online activity, so his one-time prisoner status was actually the *only* thing to show up if you googled him.
Naturally, I complied right away - somebody shouldn't be punished in 2008 or 2009 for having had the guts, in 1997 or 1998, to step forward under their own name as spokesmen for the inmates.
But I really and truly believe we would have denied *any* other requests. Specifically, if someone wanted to regret an old letter to the editor, we'd not comply with their wish but rather lecture them along the line of the xkcd comic in #15.
joellevand,
'Unpublish' is an option in Movable Type. Is it true that you invented the term 'conspiracy theory'?
It's highly open to debate, but sometimes I think that instead of fighting for privacy, we should roll with the tide and accept that our information will be all over the place. Instead, we could demand:
- the ability to access all the information that is gathered by "the powers that be" through surveillance cameras and Internet monitoring and other means;
- the ability to watch the every move of politicians, corporate leaders, cops, the military, and other authority figures.
In short, asking to give each person the ability to watch everyone. Instead of having Big Brother watch you, everyone could watch back.
It obviously flies in the face of every notion of privacy known to our species, but it's hard to think of better checks and balances in our society...
Do feel free to debate on this - I want to probe this line of thought further.
How much privacy do you think members of hunter-gatherer bands had for, say, 100,000 years? Or don't they count as members of our species? I'd say "privacy" as it is today defined is a recent addition to the human condition.
And ... if everybody knows (or easily can know) everything, what is to become of paranoia?
There are some things I quite naturally wish I had not posted or published, but that isn't what worries me; what worries me is what other people have written about me that go undiscovered and thus unanswered until I get an email that says, for example, "Did you take part in killing JFK?" Or "[...] says you were CIA in Mexico City during the 1968 student massacre. Were you?"
If you live long enough you're going to regret a lot of things, whether you did them or not.
Everything is known. Get used to it.
I wonder if anyone has been denied entry in the US because it was impossible to find anything about him/her on the Internet, which would be highly suspect?
This reminds me of the '90s, when the Internet started to get popular enough that it wasn't just for computer geeks anymore. There were a bunch of early web diarists suddenly worried that all those posts about their sex lives might get looked up (on AltaVista) and read by their parents!
In a way, this is a large-scale version of what happens any time a politician tells an offensive joke in private, and it gets leaked or turns out that the microphone was live.
Twiggy Trippit @44
You're referring to David Brin's The Transparent Society.
Buddy66 @46
Shades of the Seigenthaler incident?
Here's what Eric Hughes had to say:
Oh god no! Not my "Top 10 Most Influential Bands" article.
Please...anything but that.
Zuzu @49
Thank you! I will be reading this... ^_^
dear Innocent: any knuckle dragging monkey with a badge on the American border has the power to arbitrarily make any filthy, lying accusation against any visitor they wish, and then bar them forever when they deny it for "lying to a federal officer". America has built her cage and the bars work in both directions.
I have to say I'm with Cory on this one. It's all very well if the most regrettable thing you ever said in a chat channel, wrote an article for a 500-circulation school paper about, or mentioned on a small email list was about your tragic "Magic: the Gathering" obsession, or a poorly-worded rant about a minor issue of the day.
But the internet didn't originally come with a "Disclaimer: everything you say here will be recoverable, searchable by your name and all your aliases, forever and in perpetuity", and neither did my 500-circulation school newspaper. I don't think that was a failure to understand the technology, either: things were frequently 'lost', then, online, things would take hours of careful search-engine combing to ever locate, things really would disappear into the digital mists. Deleted emails & websites were deleted, unrecoverable, gone (until 10 years later when they weren't, suddenly). Life before Google was not life as we know it now, so decisions to disclose were made according to different parameters to the ones that now exist.
And, like the prison activist up there, I've written articles & had discussions that are now fully searchable by my full name that, at the time, were decisions made in an incredibly different information environment. I get a strong sense of privilege out of this discussion, that nobody here is really at risk of losing a job, losing a custody case, losing an immigration application because of something they wrote when they were 17 or 19 or 21 years old, 10 or 15 years ago before we all knew that everything that went online (or into print) would become findable retro-actively, and forever.
But I am now aware, for instance, and have to live with the fact that if I were to ever be sexually assaulted, and get to the point of bringing a court case about it, that my age-20 thoughts about queer sex positivity would be used as handy, useful character assassination (my free gift to the defense). That my political activism & the things I wrote about state control & direct action could well disqualify me from public sector-jobs or immigration status in many countries. That something as simple as signing "PRESENT" on the minutes of the Campus Queer Collective meeting notes- years later digitised & put up online without my consent- mean that I will probably never get to work in a Catholic school.
This shit is actually scary. These days, naturally, one engages in stringent identity-management, so that it is possible to be both employable & also to speak freely about non-state-approved, non-employer-approved topics online. But we KNOW this stuff now. The rules have changed, and we have adapted, and naturally we teach our youth these days to be very aware of their full, permanent digital profile & how to manage it (and how to create & keep distinct online identities for different purposes).
But the rules changing is a recent thing, and not everything that pops up in someone's newly-disclosed ancient history is harmless, in this cultural context & a changing political environment. Decisions were made in a different information context, one that shifted rapidly. All the "You should have known better than to expect privacy" in the world has no retroactive function. If an enterprising policing agency ever decided to comb the records of old Usenet drug use forums and launch a serious of house raids as a result I'm fairly sure most of you would be shitting your pants. Or if your name ever got added to a terrorist watch list because in 1998 your alter-ego "MadClownBoy" said "Fuck da president, I'd shoot him down!". Or if you ever lost a child custody case because of your participation in alt.sex.bdsm, which proves your unsuitability to parent in many US states.
It is very easy to, in hindsight, say: "Well you should have known better". But we didn't, then, in the cross-over years.
@22
Mongol was the last movie I saw.
The % is left as an exercise.
Gee I hope that my Netflix queue doesn't wind up in the wrong hands - I have a reputation to uphold.
Fortunately for some of us, much of the early history of Usenet was lost. The technical groups were considered worth saving, but "fluff" like soc.singles was not. As the result, some of the embarrassing things we wrote there back in the 1980s appear to be gone for good. Considering that most people used their actual names in those days, there would be plenty of potential for embarrassment.
At the time, it was a very small community that was active online, so the culture was very different.
Um, the Wayback Machine is only a few years older than the World Wide Web itself, IIRC.
Furthermore, my recollection of all popularization of digital technology of the 1980s and 1990s was its immutability. (Remember RoboCop in 1987, "He's a cyborg, you idiot! He recorded every word you said, his memories are admissible as evidence!")
In fact, the loss of digital information due to bit rot was considered so novel that it sparked a debate in the mid-90s about whether digital media really was suitable for permanent archival.
I'm massively dreading the rehash of this debate once all the young people who grew up on MySpace and Facebook are middle-aged.
Yes, we should have been using GnuPG (PGP) public key encryption all along. Yes, we probably should have built our social networking services in a distributed manner such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF). (And stop adding all those quiz apps to your profile; don't you realize that by doing so you're giving each app access to harvesting your profile data?)
...so you are saying you DON'T want your comment history back?
If it gets so bad that you think it's interfering with your livelihood, your local courthouse offers an official change of name (for around $250 in California.) You can send a copy of the court order to your former employers and their H.R. departments so it won't interfere with someone trying to check your references and resume.
Good point about the name change.
I'm glad that this is happening -- I would be more interested in reading my old (lost) work than concerned that others were. Heck, even my mother wouldn't read it -- shes a computer-illiterate.
My sister writes fanfic, and she can't even get me to read it. When she was starting out, I helped her quite a bit, but she published her most fumbling stories and let everyone see her getting better. Now she looks back and cringes a little, but views it for what it is -- evidence of how far she's come.
For the inevitable consequences of this perma-storage, read E M Forster's brilliant "The Machine Stops" (it's on gutenberg)
Captcha Heh: was babylons
So on one hand Cory wants everything to be free and open, and on the other hand Things someone published in a public forum should be locked away and controlled?
How is this a privacy issue?
Cory said: People create media in one era of technology whose scope of disclosure is limited by that technology. Another technology comes along and vastly increases the scope of disclosure and creates a rupture.
If it weren't for a "rupture" like this, nobody alive today would have ever heard of William Blake.
I was thinking about the fundamental change of digitization and searching yesterday. In the old days, you had a paper telephone directory, which meant you could get numbers from names, but it was essentially impossible to get names from a phone number. Basically, without an exhaustive months-long search by an individual, or a dedicated effort by a group, a reverse lookup was simply not reasonable.
However once you get the phone book in a digital format, searching it becomes fundamentally different. Something that was actually difficult has now become trivial. That matters.
In this case, too, I sympathize with people who have records that were very confined to a time and place become searchable to people with only a casual interest in them. For those who say "anything published should be assumed to be public in perpetuity" please tell me that you knew in 1975 or whatever that your school newspaper would be instantly available to anyone in the world with fewer than ten keystrokes. When you say "published equals perpetually viewable" it's like saying that "anything public should be perpetually viewable."
Just because the front of my house is a public space doesn't mean I think it's okay to park a camera there, to look at me going in and out every day. Making what that camera sees available and searchable to anyone on the internet is a whole different invasion of privacy. Sure, someone could stake out my house if they wanted to see what I was doing - but it would take serious time and energy. However, if you make it so that anyone can access the information with a thought, there's a fundamental change.
I could argue that "anything done in public is public and searchable forever", but I think most of us (except perhaps those living in London) hope that little gestures, silly things said, nose picking, or whatever, won't be searchable in frame-by-frame detail in 2150. Many of you seem to be arguing that it should...
@61
Reverse directories have been around for years. They weren't something that the general public always had on them, but if they went looking for one, they could find it.
Imag @61
"I could argue that "anything done in public is public and searchable forever", but I think most of us (except perhaps those living in London) hope that little gestures, silly things said, nose picking, or whatever, won't be searchable in frame-by-frame detail in 2150. Many of you seem to be arguing that it should..."
All authority figures and corporate leaders in our society should be subject to that (along with their private interactions). If we're gonna have to deal with that as everyday people, people with power must be forced to disclose everything.
I think one of the issues there is a generation gap, though. A middle-aged employer might care about employees posting pictures of themselves piss drunk on Facebook, while many young adults would shrug it off. Of course, since middle-agers hold a lot more power in our society than young people do, that makes it another power issue.
Going back to 'The Transparent Society', there is an interesting critique of it by Bruce Schneier that I've found (many of you have probably read it).
In the end, though, I think the entire world will become one big searchable thing. Just look at this article about Google Latitude. I think it's not a matter of fighting (in vain?) against information spreading out, but more of a matter of fighting against discrimination based on your searchable history. After all, it's discrimination based on expressed opinions, which should not be happening. Hell, we should probably make sure than bosses discussing job candidates be closely watched - or maybe we should just get rid of having bosses altogether.
Also, there's a need for international oversight about border crossing. The current legal idea about it is that entering a country is a privilege (as opposed to being a right), but in today's world, it should be treated more as a right than can't be taken away without very serious cause, and an appeal process.
As for discrimination against past drug use, it's about time people got of their asses and campaigned for the abolition of ALL victimless crimes.
This whole issue isn't as much about information or privacy than it is about real-world injustice and discrimination - politics and power (im)balance.
Sabik @15
Thank you - that made my day. :) Now I just have to figure how to pay rent.
Fact: Most people who write for a school newspaper put it on their college application or resume.
Conclusion: If you're going to use the position to get into a college or get a job, then the actual work you did while there should be fair game too.
On a personal level, I have had things like embarrassing letters to the editor and forum comments that I really shouldn't have written. One in particular irked me because the online magazine it was in shut down the very next month, thus, my letter stayed on their front page for years and never got properly "buried" in their archives.
The only good response is to bury these things with more information. GOOD information.
And to those who accuse the rest of us of the "privilege" of not being as vulnerable - a potential boss of mine was looking at online photo albums through my site and the *first* picture of me he clicked on was me drinking. I was fully prepared to explain myself, but didn't have to: He didn't care.
Twiggy #64
I hear you. I think it might become a big searchable thing too. And I realize that reverse directories were around. What I'm saying is that there is a fundamental difference between someone being able to sit in front of my front in a car or a house across the street and logging my ins-and-outs, versus a viewable, minable, loggable camera in front of everyone's house at all times.
I feel like Schneir is starting to get it and Brin had some important points, but they're both missing the big picture: access to information like that allows uses we haven't even thought of yet. Right now, marketing departments practice what amounts to psychological warfare on our own populace. The goal is to get us to buy stuff that we don't need, that many times is harmful to them. And despite what people think about how clever they are, we are all susceptible (ever try to not watch the TV behind someone, even when it is showing something you're completely uninterested in?).
When marketing departments know when you leave, what you wear, what "problems" you have, that just allows them to step up the manipulation. What Brin missed is that this isn't about politician you can spy on spying on you - it's about thousands of people you can't spy on connecting you to subconscious impulses you never even knew you had. Look disheveled when you leave? I'm sure that means something about what products should be advertised to you that day. And marketing departments have changed history - google "Story of Stuff" or "DeBeers history diamonds" to see how, if you haven't already read about it on this site.
Whether it's marketing departments or whomever hold Cheney's leash (I doubt they'll ever let you in on their privacy) - the point is that we can't imagine what the end is. I personally can't believe anyone would sign up for Latitude, and I'm not much for tin foil hats. I'm less worried about my boss and more about the people I never want to meet.
I guess I'm just amazed that people give up on privacy so easily. I assume it's because we've never lived through a brutal regime where we were seriously threatened. We have just lost the understanding of why those privacy protections were so important when the Bill of Rights was written. There will always be taboos, and when anyone can anonymously point out the taboos you have violated, it's a setup for a very scary time.
I'd draw a parallel between this and ubiquitous surveillance. In a public place, you can't expect any privacy: that fact is contained in the very definition of the term "public place." A police officer can follow you around, take pictures of you, write down your whereabouts and actions... but there's a world of difference between that and having CCTV cameras everywhere feeding video into a face recognition system that logs all of this information.
Surely we acknowledge a fundamental distinction between the remote possibility of being spied upon provided that someone is willing to expend considerable effort, and the constant logging of the public whereabouts of everyone at all times.
It's not just a difference in technique: ubiquitous face-recognizing CCTV isn't just a high-tech version of a stakeout. The technology changes the scope so dramatically that they're not the same act at all.
It's the same thing here: students that wrote for their high school papers implicitly understood the limited scope of their publications. Technology then comes along and changes the character of the publishing in such a way that it's no longer the same. Information that can be looked up in the musty archives of a library and information that can be looked up with six seconds of effort *are not the same thing*.
I'd go so far as to say that we have a right to be forgotten. It's not a right that a constitution ever enumerated specifically, but it's a fundamental right nonetheless. Our every action shouldn't be indefinitely archived and open to scrutiny.
The newspapers in question should understand this and balance the right to be forgotten with their goals of furthering the dissemination of information. There are a number of simple technical compromises... how about showing the author's name in an image file, so search engines can't index it? You get all the benefits of online access, and the necessary bibliographical information is there for those who truly need it.
I remember that article from my time at Penn State. We ridiculed her at the time. But in 2003, the Daily Collegian was already online.
As you bring up the subject of Google Groups “Usenet's archives online, the material we thought we'd written in a no-archive medium became part of our googlable past”
This recent post had a suggestion for a solution
http://groups.google.com/group/Groups-Suggestions/browse_thread/thread/988f39071c2d1ec5#