As a very young laddie, I do recall watching the television show “Romper Room” (once again for fear of dating myself). One of the highlights of this show was the “Magic Mirror”. The hostess of this show used this mirror to “see” each of the children in the viewing audience. Of course, she was just rhyming off random children’s names but for the little child sitting in the living room in his jammies, it felt like someone was able to reach through the technology to see him.
In today’s society, I almost see the Internet like this scenario and it’s not always a good thing.
So many of us are tech-savvy to the extent that we understand about the importance of firewalls and the basics of privacy on the web. However, our digital footprints are scattered throughout the virtual landscape of the World Wide Web and there’s very little thought to how this information represents us.
In computer technology, there is what we call a WORM drive. This is an acronym for Write Once Read Many. Most of us have an example of a WORM drive at home – and it’s our CDR burner. Without the ability to re-write information on a CD, we can write once and read many times.
Many people don’t understand that this is the equivalent of what the Internet is – especially as the search tools become more sophisticated. Very few people take into consideration that these digital footprints are not like the breadcrumbs that Hansel and Gretel spread to find their way out of the forest. Think for a moment if those breadcrumbs were permanent. How easy it would be to find the lost children. This same thing applies to the Internet. A vast majority of our electronic personas on the Internet is available to anyone.
So much of what we do on the Internet is captured electronically and is next to impossible to get rid of. The scary part is that more and more people are using these tools to lookup information on us. The searchers might be a prospective employer, or perhaps someone who we are recently dating, or perhaps someone with more nefarious intent.
A few cases in point.
A year or so ago, I applied for a volunteer position. I received a strange phone a few days later from the organization and the man asked (with some hesitancy) if I had musical inclination. Knowing how much I am NOT musical at all, I laughed and told him that I didn’t. I then asked why he asked that question. He stated that he had googled me and found a fit for another Rick McCallion who was in a band that promoted social anarchy. This gentlemen then went on to say that there were initially hesitant to have me involved in this project if I was that Rick McCallion.
There are numerous postings that I have made years ago on software support sites. Although there is nothing incriminating about these posts, it still makes me a little hesitant about what I post online.
I was also quite interested to find out that when I googled my name, that even though I closed my account a few months ago, my Twitter profile was still there. Thankfully, there wasn’t anything embarrassing in it, but it goes to show how dangerous our personas can be.
One final example, in my technology blog (plug here!!! http://techumanity.blogspot.com) I had noticed after I had posted a blog entry that I had a spelling mistake. I went back and corrected it but am vexed that the original blog entry has still been indexed by Google and as a result, this typo is evident when someone Googles my name.
You think that perhaps because some website has since ceased operation – that your content is gone? Nope. There are a few websites that permanently keep archives of the World Wide Web. Try going to the Internet Arhive Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org and try looking at existing domains or even those ones that are no longer in existence. Truly some scary stuff!
The Internet plays for keeps. For the most part, what we write is accessible to all and that is the very scary reality.
Time for us to all make sure that our silent reflections are what we want others to see.
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