The other week, a good friend of mine through my school and university days, dropped me a note. He asked me that now that he is transitioning from being a professional student to legal guru (he’s the type I’d expect would become a judge of the courts), that I pull down the website that hosts our experiment in digital media from university days. According to him, its become "a bit of an issue because I have two journal articles out, and its been brought to my attention that a search brings up writing of a very mixed tone/quality!".
In what seemed like a different lifetime for me, I ran a university Journalist’s Society and we experimented with media as a concept. One of our successful experiments, was a cheeky weekly digital newsletter, that held the student politicians in our community accountable. Often our commentary was hard-hitting, and for $4 web hosting bills a month and about 10 hours work each, we become a new power on campus influencing actions. It was fun, petty, and a big learning experience for everyone involved, including the poor bastards we massacred with accountability.
Privacy in the electronic age: is there an off button?
However this touches on all of us as we progress through life, what we thought was funny in a previous time, may now be awkward that we are all grown up. In this digitally enabled world, privacy has come to the forefront as an issue - and we are now suddenly seeing scary consequences of having all of our information available to anyone at anytime.
I’ve read countless articles about this, as I am sure you have. One story I remember is a guy who contributed to a marijuana discussion board in 2000, now struggles with jobs as that drug-taking past of his is the number one search engine result. The digital world, can really suck sometimes.
Why do we care?
This is unique and awkward, because it’s not someone defaming us. It’s not someone taking our speech out of context, and menacingly putting it a way that distorts our words. This is 100% us, stating what we think, with full understanding what the consequences of our actions were. We have no one but ourselves to blame.
Time changes, even if the picture doesn’t: Partner seeing pictures of you - can be ok. Ex seeing pictures of you - likely not ok.
In the context of privacy, is it our right to determine who can see what about us, when we want them to? Is privacy about putting certain information in the "no one else but me" box or is it more dynamic then that - meaning, it varies according to the person consuming the information?
When I was younger, I would meet attractive girls quite a bit older than me, and as soon as I told them my age, they suddenly felt embarrassed. They either left thinking how could they let themselves be attracted to a younger man, treating me like I was suddenly inferior, or they showed a very visible reaction of distress! Actually, quite memorably when I was 20 I told a girl that I was on a date with that I was 22 - and she responded "thank God, because there is nothing more unattractive I find, than a guy that is younger than me". It turned out, fortunately, she had just turned 22. My theory about age just got a massive dose of validation.
Now me sharing this story is that certain information about ourselves can have adverse affects on us (in this case, my sex life!). I normally could not care less about my age, but with girls I would meet when I went out, I did care because it affected their perception of me. Despite nothing changing, the single bit of information about my age would totally change the interaction I had with a girl. Likewise, when we are interacting with people in our lives, the sudden knowledge of a bit of information could adversely affect their perception.
Some doors are best kept shut. Kinky for some; stinky for others
A friend of mine recently admitted to his girlfriend of six months that he’s used drugs before, which had her breakdown crying. This bit of information doesn’t change him in any way; but it shapes her perception about him, and the clash with her perception with the truth, creates an emotional reaction. Contrast this to these two party girls I met in Spain in my nine-months away, who found out I had never tried drugs before at the age of 21. I disappointed them, and in fact, one of them (initially) lost respect for me. These girls and my friends girlfriend, have two different value systems. And that piece of information, generates a completely differing perception - taking drugs can be seen as a "bad person" thing, or a "open minded" person, depending on who you talk to.
As humans, we care about what other people think. It influences our standing in society, our self-confidence, our ability to build rapport with other people. But the issue is, how can you control your image in an environment that is uncontrollable? What I tell one group of people for the sake of building rapport with them, I should also have the ability of ensuring that conversation is not repeated to others, who may not appreciate the information. If I have a fetish for women in red heels which I share with my friends, I should be able to prevent that information from being shared with my boss who loves wearing red heels and might feel a bit awkward the next time I look at her feet.
Any solutions?
Not really. We’re screwed.
Well, not quite. To bring it back to the e-mail exchange I had with my friend, I told him that the historian and technologist in me, couldn’t pull down a website for that reason. After all, there is nothing we should be ashamed about. And whilst he insisted, I made a proposal to him: what about if I could promise that no search engine would include those pages in their index, without having to pull the website down?
He responded with appreciation, as that was what the issue was. Not that he was ashamed of his prior writing, but that he didn’t want academics of today reading his leading edge thinking about the law, to come across his inflammatory criticism of some petty student politicians. He wanted to control his professional image, not erase history. So my solution of adding a robots.txt file was enough to get his desired sense of privacy, without fighting a battle with the uncontrollable.
Who knew, that privacy can be achieved with a text file that has two lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Those two lines are enough to control the search engines, from a beast that ruins our reputation, to a mechanism of enforcing our right to privacy. Open standards across the Internet, enabling us to determine how information is used, is what DataPortability can help us do achieve so we can control our world. The issue of privacy is not dead - we just need some creative applications, once we work out what exactly it is we think we are losing.
It’s “the prisoner’s dilema” in action. You’ve now set up a case where a certain kind of product will be able to gain competitive advantage by ignoring robots.txt.
Imagine that you’re a “people” oriented search engine like spock.com.[*] You want users to think of yourself instead of google when performing a certain kind of search (in this case, about people). You now have an enormous incentive to cheat and ignore robots.txt, because it will provide a richer data set.
There is no technical way to prevent a search engine from vacuuming up the content. Robots.txt is just a convention.
This is a really interesting problem, because this technology we use every day is in direct conflict with the way humans work. We naturally put more importance on information that’s new to us, even if it’s actually old news.
I don’t know what the solution is, but our options seem to be (1) teenagers stop being stupid, or (2) people learn to discount or ignore old information.
Neither seems particularly likely.
[*] This is not to imply that spock.com or any other search engine is ignoring robots.txt or doing anything else that would appear improper. I only mention them as a potential case.
As Steven is briefly pointing out in his #2 point in the final paragraph, a big part of the problem is about people that look up and read stuff about you. Retards and poor-minded people will not discount or ignore old information about you. And most likely they will use them to attack or blacken you.
I think it’s somehow desirable, as it’s automatically filtering stupid people out of my way.
Just today I experienced something similar myself. Some days ago a friend of mine got to my blog/site, where you could find a funny YouTube video (one of the funniest I’ve watched lately, to be honest). He told me I should remove it, as it’s not a good professional presentation to have it on my home site (and this was the opinion of a possible employer, he added).
Frankly, I was happy to hear that. Cinic or sad people that don’t like to have fun or think that professional world must be all serious and perfect are not for me. Go find someone else.
As long as you are conscious of the privacy implications of your acts and what you write reflects what you are/think/feel, posting/publishing ideas or content in general on the web is perfectly fine. It’s going to make you two favours: first you are showing people who you truly are and secondly you are avoiding people that do not match your personality!
Steve that’s a good point, but you neglect to recognise something more simple.
The very fact Google, Yahoo and MSN respect it is enough. It means simple discovery type searches, are now excluding these results. For a person to now get these results, it’s no longer accidential but with intent. That being, the person searching now specifically wants information about about you.
Think about the analogy of your landlord visiting your apartment. You chuck everything in the drawers to make it look clean. Sure - she can open the drawers if she suspects you are hiding something, invading your privacy, but from the generic view of searching everything is tidy. All this convention does is clear the view a bit, not restrict it.
What I am getting at, is that simple exclusions from the major search engines may be enough.
But your point of a people specific engine (how mainstream is spock? Brands are hard against entrenched players), imagine if the cost of searching on these engines was more. Imagine if the population understood something like Robots.txt - made sure the government understood how much it mattered to them - and national governments then legislated that search engine ignoring that convention are in breach of fair trade. Either that search engine is blacklisted domestically, or its brand is demonised. Sure it doesn’t stop people from using it, as there are always workgrounds, but the cost to do so suddently increases.
You could also think about the potential of having CMS’s allowing users to change their names easily (in a de-centralised manner), so that search engines either
1) Pick up the new name, disassociating your name with that content
2) Can’t pick up the name because it’s captcha protected
3) The name is now an image, with a glittery background to make OCR difficult and non-standard and hence not scraped by search engines.
So yes, that information will never disappear. But for the person who so easily would stumble upon that information, the roaming discovery is now excluded and niche searches now have an added cost.
Nice post, Elias.
Interesting post - but what about the Wayback machine? Nothing really goes away forever on the web.
I think the only real solution is Steven’s second point:
> (2) people learn to discount or ignore old information
Anything else is an uphill battle, a fight against the second law of thermodynamics. Information is simply extremely hard to control and many methods to try to control it make things only worse (think DRM, DMCA or a UN treaty about robots.txt).
We live in a transitional era: thirty years from now, there will be so much embarrassing information about each and everyone on the planet, that nobody cares about that anymore. People will simply realize that everyone does a lot of stupid things in their lives and everyone changes their mind every now and then.
The problem is that right now, some people still have a “clean” record and others do not. And some people don’t care about this and others do. And this can create all sorts of problems as you have described.
But make no mistake: privacy is dead and we ain’t seen nothing yet: wait until Google gets their facial recognition right and mobile phones start broadcasting everything their cameras and microphones see. Seen the recent Batman movie? Only now there’s not one guy “in control” of the technology: it’s everywhere. Don’t fight it: adapt, use it!
Just one practical example: Sarah Palin. Her team is trying everything it can to keep here image clean, but it’s completely backfiring; even Fox doesn’t like it. It’s just become too easy for people to find the facts and announce them publicly. I think she would be wise if she simply be open about everything and uses this to her advantage to look more real, e.g. “yes I have yahoo account with an insecure password, just like everyone else”. (I still wouldn’t vote for her camp, but I am not from the USA so that’s pretty irrelevant)