Anatomy of a Privacy Nightmare 275
itwbennett writes "Gennette Cordova knows first-hand how impossible it is to erase yourself from the Internet. The 21-year-old college student was the hapless recipient of a photo of a Congressman Anthony Weiner bulging in his boxers. Ms. Cordova then 'watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.' She then tried to remove her personal information from the web, one social network at a time. But the fact is, 'until a site's Webmaster removes the offending content, it will remain accessible via search engines like Google,' says blogger Dan Tynan."
It wasn't his Tweet (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't him. He was set up using a "feature" of Yfrog that leaves a gaping security hole. [blogspot.com]
I submitted [slashdot.org] the story from CannonFire yesterday, but it's still pending.
A tricky problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I've long since gotten used to the idea that everything I say online - going back to Usenet days and even before - will stay with me forever. Some times you just have to remind people that it was X years ago and people/opinions change. Would you take advice from someone in mid-life whose opinions hadn't changed since their teens?
That's all garden-variety stuff by now, but I did have a more interesting case come up on my website. I had occasion to write about someone who was trying to scam people with an online "contest" that was rigged. Yes, I named names, especially after the guy (who went by more than one name BTW) tried to intimidate me with fake legal threats. Years later, I got email saying that he'd reformed, he was trying to get a job, but potential employers would Google for his name and find my site. Tough luck, I thought, and continued to think as the pleas kept coming every few months for years. What finally got my attention was when he mentioned that he now had a family. This little piece of history, no matter how valid, was now starting to affect *other people* who were completely innocent. While I don't believe in censorship, I do believe in the validity of the "statute of limitations" concept so I decided on a compromise. The article about this guy is still on my site, you can even find it by searching there, but you can't find it by searching on Google. (Robots.txt plus referer blocking specific to that post, for those who care.)
The lesson is that the existence of information and the ease with which it may be looked up are two different things. Dirt is just too easy to find, for the same reasons that gold is too hard: search engines' evaluation of "importance" or "relevance" doesn't always match any sane human's. While it should be *possible* to find someone's decade-old forum posts, perhaps it's not quite right for the most inflammatory thing they ever said to be the very first thing that shows up in a casual search . . . and it often will be, because controversy drives higher rankings. Making stuff just a little bit harder to find, like we all do here with low-rated comments and like I basically did in this little anecdote, deserves more frequent consideration as an alternative to deletion.