It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers whose meteoric growth was celebrated by all power structures.
Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online. Murderers would probably get you or something. Don't want randos knowing you you are. Besides, handles were cooler. Some well known people had publicly known aliases, but aliases were the norm... like on HN.
In my bubble, it was FB that really broke through this. I heard about fb as a social network, but with real names. That way you could friend people from real life. It was actually quite a revelation, like a public address book... very useful.
Anyway... Zuck is, IMO, more of an "eye for the tides" guy than the tide itself. He realised that "relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously" was happening and he decided to be there first.
Definitely pretty much everyone was anonymous on warez boards and the like. On the other hand, a lot of local BBSs actually had something of a local community in real life as well. And the people accessing Usenet from corporate and academic accounts often used their name and affiliation.
In the mid-2000s I was at school, where we were simultaneously being taught (in 'Information and Communication Technology' lessons) never to use a real name online [0], and signing up to Bebo & MySpace with our real names.
It's (there beginning to exist people) growing up with the internet that all but killed that, I'm sure of it.
[0] with some limited web ring/social network type site for schools, for which we given aliases and then, I don't know, wrote BBcode and marquees and stuff about our school-safe interests and hobbies
It's like in the story about the frog in the pot of hot water, if someone keeps telling the frog, "you know, that water isn't going to stop getting hotter," and the frog is saying "seems fine to me, I think you worry too much."
that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly.
humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.
This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context.
My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them.
What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.)
ps. I forgot Secrets!
Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.
But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.
Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files.
Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself.
I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look.
Except... not. All too often, we see stuff people did or wrote years ago being used against them. Those things may not reflect the person they are today, and that's even worse than "hat[ing] with perfect precision."
The second and more serious problem is people thinking that algorithms are so smart that are infallible. This, when a much more sophisticated human brain would have a serious trouble trying to navigate the long lists of random dictionary words that we enter in a browser.
Netizens in general don't understand, or don't care, and just simplify and fill the gaps until they have a caricature that can fit in some "well known stereotype" slot. The result is that our societies are being more and more fractured, radicalized and isolated into different groups.
I wonder why white pages fell out of favor. Maybe the global access made them a bit too invasive, or people voted with their feet. Or switched to mobile phones which did not do this.
That sort of information is regularly bought and sold today. A breach that's just names, addresses, and phone numbers will draw a few headlines, some comments on HN, and a bunch of scolding tweets. But I don't imagine most people see that as particularly sensitive information in most circumstances. (Some exceptions of course such as the fact that you're in a particular database is itself sensitive.)
A database feeds more evil than a printed book could, even if scanning/ocr it were feasible.
People could look up numbers online if they wanted to, so there was just no need for a big book any longer. They also never had cell numbers so they became less useful in that regard. And most people don't just call a person out of the blue any longer.
I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.
This old article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/06/why-isn-t-there-... claims that the wireless carriers didn't want to put out a directory because consumers would be upset if they had to pay for junk calls.
A huge percentage of society is willing to accept anything Facebook, Google, and Apple throw at them and simply don't care about the present and future ramifications. Some think about it, others enjoy the convenience or think that there's no way it can harm them. Some even drink the cool aid and honestly believe surveillance is good for society.
I fully expect to wind up in a future where we're all starring in our own versions of the Truman Show. Sensors everywhere, constantly streaming our choices and preferences. Our health data, associations, and even thoughts and feelings used against us.
When everyone is watching everything you do, you're no longer free.
Including one of the largest power structures, "users who enjoyed the convenience of finding people."
I'm really glad, that my teenage years where before social media and everyone walking around with internet connected cameras on them all the time. All the stupid and embarrassing things I did only live in the memories of the people I was with and it is fun to talk about every now and then.
But when going out these days, there is an almost constant "peer-surveilance" with everyone taking pictures and videos and immediately sharing them online without reflecting whether it is a good idea and just assuming consent of the others. Then when asking people to remove it, the request is often met with bewilderment or mockery why you'd want that. And sure, I could legally go after the person, but that is not really something you'd want to do within a (extended) circle of friends.
I think there are a lot of very cool things that can be done these days that weren't possible in my time. But the complete disrespect of others peoples privacy and their image is really scary to me.
This would require a cultural shift away from gossip. But humans love gossip.
If you can't stop gossip, you can't stop someone from saying things they learned about another person, and by extension you can't stop it from being automated neither.
- You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting
- You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence
- There are certainly situations where many of us have a public presence under our real names. If you ever speak at most conferences for example or publish an article or paper.
No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.
But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.
Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.
Credit reporting is one thing, but my experience is that they don’t do a great job connecting the dots. I’m still missing my student loans on my credit report, despite having not missed a payment in the last 8 years.
That's obviously a lower bar than preventing a determined tracker from learning things about you but it's enough for many people who simply don't want to turn up in a random Google search.
Most countries do fine without mandatory surveillance based credit reporting. And banks still gave out loans before credit cards.
I don't think this is right, at least not in the context of the parent. Perhaps it's true in regards to _public_ posts on the internet, but I think it's important to consider private photos.
If you upload photos to your private Google Photos account, it will ask you "is this FriendA?" and have you train an image classifier for all your friends. Even if FriendA is not online, as long as FriendB is taking photos of FriendA and tagging them (for example, to make it easier for FriendB to search their photo album) then Google knows how to recognize FriendA.
I have no idea if this training data is used outside of FriendB's library, but I'd assume so.
Public indexes is just the surface of the iceberg. And regulating them down would just be more profit for the pay-to-play.
So…
If so, where do you draw the line between people whose information is useful to the public and people who shouldn't be cataloged?
I haven't checked the exact wording of this definition but, as a summary, "The Supreme Court has defined public figures as those who hold government office and those who have achieved a role of special prominence in the affairs of society by reason of notoriety of their achievements or vigor and success with which they seek public's attention. "
Otherwise, frankly, fuck the public.
For a long time the first Google result for me was someone from my school posting about work I did. I didn't find their comments particularly complimentary. I wasn't wild about the idea that someone at a prospective employer would probably Google me and see that. I didn't like the idea of harassing the site owner into taking it down, but I will say a big motivator for me in open-source has been flooding the Internet with better reflections of myself to drown out stuff like that. Stuff ends up on the Internet without people's knowledge or express consent all the time. When I joined LinkedIn they already knew a bunch of people I could be connected to. I never gave them that info about my relationships. Other people did! First thing I got was a suggestion to connect with my ex-girlfriend. I hardly think I'm an anomaly with stuff like this.
edit: As another datapoint, I have a coworker who is fanatical about privacy. Will refuse to stand in group photos. Will ask you to delete photos they may appear in if they see you taking one. Gives random names on restaurant orders. No LinkedIn, no social media. I Googled their name: tons of accurate photos, an accurate phone number, school history, etc.
The issue comes when I put stuff on my website about someone else, as in your example. I want my content to be on Google, but you want my content off of Google. At that point, there's a conflict and it's not clear to me who should be resolving it and what position Google should take.
The options are:
1. No one gets to be indexed, which will hurt the millions who want people to discover their content
2. Google has to manually decide in every single instance like the one you mention in your post, that seems unrealistic
3. The status quo, which is that Google indexes what's posted publicly.
google ought to respond to reasonable requests to delist, but I don't think it's reasonable for it to guarantee that certain types of information never get indexed.
What’s more interesting is how inaccurate a lot of this data is. Spokeo for example seems to think I am related to someone because they share a last name and we lived in the same apartment building at some point. Google’s approach of simply collecting third party information simply isn’t reliable.
Which isn’t a problem for Google because their standards seem to be good enough to target advertising, but it is a problem for everyone else.
Even name + (previous) employers barely finds me, because it's all about using those employers' services in relation to the books. Name + location is about book signings.
The only downside is when my namesake was interviewed on the radio and a) I kind of freaked out a bit when they said Terry Gross was going to talk to me later in the day, and I was totally unprepared, b) it was really weird listening to her introduce me incorrectly, I didn't grow up where she said or anything. Also, people send me pictures of 'my' books when they see them, which is a lot.
I love the relative anonyminity though.
Most people outside tech won’t know that they’re opting into this or what the consequences could be. Children especially can’t be expected to understand that giving away all that personal data could have serious consequences in their future.
take linkedin for example. what could possibly be the point of making a linkedin account other than to have people you don't/barely know message you about jobs, or vice versa? or look at how people use instagram. the whole point of using the platform seems (to me) to be to accumulate as many follows as possible.
I do think there's at least an argument to be made about reasonable defaults. unless it's overwhelmingly clear that a person would want their profile to be public, it should be private by default. perhaps private should be the only option for minors.
Some search engines also index WHOIS data. So if you don't use privacy options then you may be searchable via that too.
Most registrars have started to hide the real info because of GDPR. I live outside of EU, but my registrar stopped showing my name and address in WHOIS queries without having to opt into their privacy options.
1 would be easily taken care of because businesses want their stuff indexed, but 2 would be quite something i.e. the ascent of privacy laws.
I'd also like to see this 'tool' made available to anyone. I'm not sure if random photos of people are 'in the public interest', or beyond that if we really get some kind of transcendent value out of all that 'data'. My bet is that most of the power we get from 'sharing' has to do with explicit knowledge i.e. news, research, data APIs etc.
This will never go away without regulatory intervention. Too much money in it, too much control, and control leads to power.
It wouldn't eliminate this problem, assuming you consider it a problem. A lot of the images floating around aren't tied to a name. Anyone can save a file and re-use it in some other context.
Yandex has an index of people's faces. You can search pictures by face.
And China... you know. It is a surveillance nightmare.
The reality is, I walk in and still see a grandma who doesn’t respect the wishes of my wife and I and are adding filters to my kids faces. Now Instagram has their photos. No consent given. I don’t think she posted, but clearly her phone gave Instagram access.
Imo we need laws forbidding image indexing or collection of images. We also need some serious protections around data. The reality is Google, Microsoft, Apple, Chinese communist party, zoom, etc all have too much data and own everyone. Literally, I can’t imagine the government taking any action at all because of their influence.
So I think we are done, frankly.
Genuinely interested in what folks think about this, pro or con.
Edited to add: The reason I think this question is interesting is because I think it shines a light on some tension between privacy rights and freedom of information.