Wise experts tell to be careful what we throw around on the internet. They tell us that everything we email, post on MySpace, put on a web page, etc. is out there somewhere forever. If you post a pic of yourself in a wet t-shirt contest or call your boss a drunken lemming, a clever wizard can dig it up when you run for mayor.
Is it true? True, but exaggerated? It it nonsense?
Right now, there’s a controversy about some missing e-mails in a unit of government. If the internet is permanent, how can any email ever be truly lost?
This is a question about technology, not politics. The political part has its own thrread over in Great Debates. The stuff I don’t understand about computers and the internet could fill volumes. In fact, it does. I didn’t want to hijack the GD thread with a technology question, so I brought it here.
Its really exaggerated to be honest. I mean look at my user name. I really do not care if people know my name is Chris Booth. Google it! There are several Chris Booths in the world even an Artist and a Dr! Yes if you turn into the next Star Wars kid or numa numa kid it will be hard to ever get your face off the internet but i have several pictures of myself that were deleted and never to be found. Sure its possible for someone to get your idenity but that is possible without the internet. I see people here who are afraid to give their last name! or even the city they live in out of fear. Its honestly a joke.
If something stays out there forever, it’s generally because someone decided to keep it. With things on the Web, this is not too difficult, since things on the Web can be seen by millions of people, and someone might like it. E-mails, though, are typically seen only by two people, the sender and the recipient. It’s still quite possible for them to stick around for a long time (if one or both people just never bother cleaning out their mailboxes), and it’s possible that one or both ISPs are keeping backups even if both people delete it, but they’re not going to just spontaneously pop back up from the collective consciousness.
It’s not literally true. But it is true that computers make saving data trivial. People back up data all the time. And the distributed nature of the internet means that you can’t just delete an item and know that it’s deleted forever, because there could be copies of that item on any number of machines, or on any number of backup drives. And even deleting something from your computer doesn’t really delete it, it just tells your operating system to forget where it was. The data is still there until the hard drive rewrites to that sector.
If someone posts a naked picture on a website, then panics the next day and removes the naked picture, it’s very likely that someone somewhere still has a copy of that picture. Even if no one saved the picture on purpose, files are saved temporarily in your browser cache. The website could have been backed up any number of times, any computer that displayed that webpage had to have a copy of that picture in its memory.
So yeah, people really do lose data, it happens all the time. And if you remove that naked picture it’s very possible that no one saw it, no one downloaded it, it wasn’t backed up anywhere, and even when you run for governor 10 years later the odds are that even if someone saved the picture they won’t be able to find it to send it to the Enquirer. But you can’t be sure of that, can you?
Companies purge their e-mail servers all the time but the Sarbane-Oxley act basically requires companies to keep archives on their e-mails basically indefinitely for good measure and for legal purposes . I work for a mega-corp and I can delete e-mails from my own computer but it would be rare for that to be just a one-on-one communication. That would make two of them but far more common is for it to be an e-mail with a dozen people or more included in a thread which would make dozens or hundreds of copies somewhere plus the backups on the servers. If someone absolutely needed to find the core message, it would be there somewhere.
I have a name that is most likely unique in the world and I posted a message on an obscure board that I am not proud of and Google picked it up as one of the top results for me. I also posted Usenet responses that were intelligent but obscure in 1995 - 1996 and Google returns those as well for me. Anyone, friends or family, that searches for my name will see all of those and that spans before the Web existed much at all and before Google’s birth.
Of course, people who have surfed the Wayback Machine for old copies of your web pages can save those forever and there’s nothing you can do about that.
Maybe the solution is to nuke the Internet from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I’ve always treated the “watch out what you post online, it’ll be around forever” warning as one similar to gun owners always treating guns as loaded-- it’s not necessarily true, but the risks of ignoring the advice are great enough that one should act as if it’s true.
That said, I’ve been quite thankful some of my more ridiculous actions online back in the late 80s/early 90s seem to not have been archived.