>from the november 25, 1998 issue of Salon
>SALON MAGAZINE
>
>The Net Never Forgets- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - -

>EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER POSTED ONLINE
>COULD COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU SOMEDAY.


>BY J.D. LASICA | Our past now follows us as never before. For centuries,
>refugees sailed the Atlantic to start new lives; Easterners pulled up stakes
>and moved west. Today, reinvention and second chances come less easily: You
>may leave town, but your electronic shadow stays behind.
>We often view the Internet as a communications medium or an
>information-retrieval tool, but it's also a powerful archiving technology
>that takes snapshots of our digital lives -- and can store those fleeting
>images forever.

>Not only are official documents and consumer profiles accumulating, but the
>very essence of our daily online existence -- our political opinions,
>prejudices, religious beliefs, sexual tastes and personal quirks -- are all
>becoming part of an immense, organic media soup that is congealing into a
>permanent public record. What is different about the digital archiving
>phenomenon is that our beliefs, habits and indiscretions are being preserved
>for anyone to see -- friends, relatives, rivals, lovers, neighbors, bosses,
>landlords, even obsessed stalkers.

>Take all those homespun Web pages out there. People assume that their home
>pages disappear once they pull the plug. Not necessarily: While your browser
>may report a "404: File Not Found" when you call up an offline Web page,
>those pages live on in other electronic nooks and crannies. Since 1996, the
>Internet Archive, a kind of digital warehouse, has been trolling the Web and
>hoarding everything it comes across -- text, images, sound clips. Every two
>months, it scoops up the entire Web and stores the results on its virtual
>shelves. It has preserved my expired site, and it may well have yours.

>Bulletin board messages live on far after the threads peter out. The
>messages we send to the Internet's 33,000 newsgroups often fall off the edge
>of Usenet after a week or so, but the postings live on in databases like
>Deja News and the Internet Archive.

>Mailing lists, where people toss off casual correspondences as if writing to
>a close-knit group of friends, are often archived for all the world to see.
>Marie Coady, a freelance writer in Woburn, Mass., was appalled to discover
>that her messages to online-news, a small, cozy listserv of 1,350 news
>professionals, had been posted on the Web and summarily stored by dozens of
>search engines -- and made available to tens of millions of readers.

>"When I typed my name into a search engine and found everything I've ever
>written online, I felt violated and helpless," she says. "It was like coming
>home and finding someone had gone through my personal belongings. I consider
>it an invasion of privacy to have words typed in response to a query
>chiseled in stone. In light of our litigious society, it could be dangerous
>to post any message at all." Although the moderator posts occasional notices
>that mention the list's public archiving policy, not all listserv hosts do
>so, and few users bother to read the fine print.

>"The odd thing is, we perceive the Net as a conversation and not as public
>record, and it turns out to be public record to a larger extent than people
>are aware of," says Bruce Schneier, a cryptography consultant and co-editor
>of the 1997 book "The Electronic Privacy Papers." "You can easily imagine in
>20 years a candidate being asked about a conversation he had in a chat room
>while he was in college. We're becoming a world where everything is
>recorded."

>Beyond the question of informed consent lie larger questions: Should all of
>this electronic flotsam and jetsam be archived in the first place? What are
>the consequences for us if our digital footprints survive indefinitely? Who
>should decide whether they do survive?

>The answers are hardly comforting, especially for those given to strong
>displays of emotion or opinion online. "We're now entering an era where tens
>of millions of people are speaking on the record without any understanding
>of what it means to speak on the record, and that's certainly
>unprecedented," says David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy
>Information Center in Washington. "It is suddenly becoming impossible to
>escape your past."

>Your children and grandchildren not yet born will be able to reconstruct a
>record of your digital life -- not just the good stuff but also the
>best-forgotten postings to alt.sex.fish or rec.nude. The Web shrine you once
>erected to an old flame, with its hyperventilating vows of eternal devotion,
>may give pause to a new lover in your life. The union solidarity page you
>put up at your first job -- years before you were bucking for senior
>management -- may come back to haunt your efforts to get a promotion. And
>who would have predicted that your Senate candidacy would go down in flames
>when your political opponent uncovered the image-rich homage to porn star
>Ashlyn Gere you posted in college?

>Most people don't have posterity in mind when they fire off notes or post
>Web pages. Observes Schneier: "When you're in college and posting things
>online, you're young and immortal and you don't think about the impact your
>words will have five minutes from now, much less five, 10 or 20 years down
>the road."

>We can already see the outlines of this new world. When you apply for a job
>in the high-tech sector, there's a fair chance your prospective employer
>will use a search engine to scout out your online postings, from late-night
>musings to intemperate rants fired off to a political news group. Would an
>employer's decision be colored by information that has nothing to do with a
>candidate's job qualifications, such as your out-of-the-mainstream religious
>beliefs, sexual orientation, HIV status or personal habits? Absolutely, and
>without apology. After all, "character" counts, too.

>Federal law makes it a crime for government agencies to compare most digital
>information about U.S. citizens, points out Fred Cate, a law professor at
>Indiana University and author of "Privacy in the Information Age." But
>nothing prevents private companies or individuals from doing so. Criminal
>convictions, driving records, property records and voter registration
>records might be available with a few keystrokes.

>Should employers, neighbors and descendants not yet born be able to poke
>around in the digital attic for information about you?
>
>Cate believes there are good reasons for us not to be overly concerned.
>"It's the democratizing of Big Brother, and that's not such a bad thing," he
>says. "You can find out as much about your boss as he can about you. I'm not
>really happy that someone down the hall can follow me and make a database
>about me, but that's the way it is in the digital age. If your feelings get
>bruised, tough. If the information's true and not distorted, then you're
>stuck with the things you said online years ago. I don't see this as a
>privacy issue."

>Perhaps not in the narrowest sense. But if every online expression becomes
>fodder for somebody's professional, personal or political agenda, clearly we
>lose certain freedoms of expression in the bargain. Do you really want to
>live next door to Big Brother, even a more democratic one?

>Says Sobel: "If you define privacy as the right of individuals to control
>information about themselves, as we do, then mega-archiving systems clearly
>raise significant privacy issues. These systems convert every passing
>thought and contemporaneous musing into a permanent, retrievable record --
>without, in many cases, the knowledge or consent of the creator."

>Even Brewster Kahle, who founded the nonprofit Internet Archive and its
>commercial offshoot, Alexa Internet, says, "There are some tricky issues
>here. A lot of this material is public, but is it really meant to endure?"

>What Kahle is doing is nothing less than astonishing. Alexa's 36 employees,
>working in a century-old building in San Francisco's Presidio, send out
>"spiders" to crawl the Web and Usenet and store the text, video and audio on
>a digital jukebox tape drive. It takes about two months to capture all 300
>million-plus publicly accessible Web pages. So far they've scooped up 12
>terabytes of content, or 12 trillion bytes.
>
>Kahle says he launched his project because "we need to preserve our digital
>heritage. Unless we start saving it, every passing day we're losing the
>record of one of the great turning points in human history." His Internet
>Archive and Alexa have drawn widespread praise from academics, historians
>and Net luminaries concerned that the Web's pioneer days may soon become
>irretrievably lost. For researchers and scholars, it's a field day. For the
>rest of us, it's a mixed blessing.
>
>Sobel cites a letter he just received from a stockbroker who was distraught
>about a new database, compiled by the National Association of Security
>Dealers, profiling the backgrounds of stockbrokers nationwide. "He had a
>felony conviction 23 years ago, when he was in his 20s. And now that
>information is about to become searchable online for the first time. He
>thinks this is outrageous, and I tend to agree with him."
>
>Individuals can't even prevent private indiscretions from winding up as part
>of the Internet's global voyeurism machine. "I just got a phone call from a
>distraught mother whose 16-year-old daughter's ex-boyfriend posted nude
>photos of her on the Web," Sobel says. "The photos were consensual when they
>were taken. So suddenly it's part of the public domain, and even if the
>mother persuades him to take them down, he may no longer have control over
>how long this stuff is out there. This teenage girl may have to live with
>that for the rest of her life."
>
>Kahle offers another example: "The president's personal home page is
>probably in our archives now -- the person who'll become president in 20 or
>30 years. You know that he or she is the kind of person who already has a
>Web page up in college."
>
>Are we condemned, then, to a future where journalists will pore over every
>online college-age musing of a prospective president?
>
>Sobel says, "We need a public debate to redefine the concepts of what should
>be private and public. Should anyone be able to type your name into a search
>engine and come up with public records about your private life? What good
>are laws that expunge a crime from your record if the old records remain
>accessible to anyone on the Net? What about information that's misleading,
>inaccurate or that you had no idea was out there in cyberspace?"
>
>Kahle is well aware of the debate, and he's working with legal experts,
>historians and privacy advocates to determine the best way to make archived
>material available. "I used to be very oriented toward privacy, trying to
>keep track of who knows what about me," he said. "I've become less fanatical
>about it, because I find that it's more valuable to be found than for me to
>be obscure. For those who don't want to be found, we should let them be."
>
>But do we have that option anymore? As the Net becomes ubiquitous, its
>underlying essence of interconnectedness and community comes with a price:
>the loss of anonymity. We are being drawn forcibly, inexorably, into the
>global town square.
>
>That is no reason to avoid the Internet (as if we could!). The Net is a
>gift, connecting us with like-minded individuals around the world, letting
>us interact in soul-stirring ways. But we need to be aware that our digital
>footprints are permanent ones: The Net has forgotten how to forget.
>
>This can be both blessing and curse. For many of us, it would be marvelous
>for our grandchildren to summon up our very first home page. For others,
>whose online forays may not be the stuff of posterity, a gentle
>forgetfulness would be far kinder.
>
>Once, words were spoken and vanished like vapor in the air; newsprint faded
>and turned to dust. Today, our pasts are becoming etched like a tattoo into
>our digital skins.
>SALON | Nov. 25, 1998
>
>J.D. Lasica is a new media columnist for the American Journalism Review and
>the Industry Standard.
>
>
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