Internet!=privacy
October 12, 2006
Yahoo released their Internet time capsule today. It’s an interesting property of the Internet that just about anything accessible by a searchbot can be considered as part of permanent web history. I would guess that even pages marked as ‘no-cache’ are still being crawled and saved by ‘bots posing as IE or Firefox.
So it seems that once you hit that post, send, or upload button, it’s good to keep in mind that you’re making Internet history, for better or worse. As Scott Adams found out, retractions don’t really work in the age of the Internet. In a way, the Intenet monitors and records (for what may seem like an eternity) all web activity.
It’s not limited to public Internet spaces either. The beauty of ideas is that they take up no space or materials and are thus easy to disseminate. Rep. Foley learned that instant messages are not so private, and many Craigslist users found that e-mails can be <gasp> re-posted.
