Protect yo'self

I can't tell you how many times during my time at The Daily Texan I received phone calls from frantic UT graduates begging for us to take down a comment or guest column from the Web site they had published during their undergraduate career with little thought as to how it might affect them later. Although it can be argued that taking content down is against some sort of journalistic ethic or obligation to preserve history, most of the time we obliged them because we all know how much it blows to have sucky google results when you're applying for jobs. 

Internet privacy is one of those nagging subjects that comes up in my life semi-frequently and every time I'm reminded of it, I get nervous and want to change the subject. My Facebook profile is set to private, my Twitter updates are protected, my Webspace isn't shared... what else can I do? I fully admit to "vanity googling," which I started doing a few years ago to find my published articles. With a unique name, most of the first few pages of the 4,610 results that come up for my name are actually about me. Almost all of them are professional or school-related. The other day, my friend and classmate googled me during our multimedia lab and complimented me on my results, "Nice google search!" I thought it was really funny but also a really great compliment. Good google search results matter a lot for an aspiring journalist. 

But there are actually two embarrassing items that come up when you google my name. Both are comments I accidentally left on statesman.com telling some DT senior reporters to cover breaking news which we, as a student publication, hadn't heard about yet. (In case you didn't know, The Daily Texan sort of likes to think of itself as competing with the Statesman... silly, I know). "COVER THIS ANDREW!!!" is one of my comments left at the end of a breaking news story. I meant to e-mail the link to him and am not sure how it ended up as a comment, but to this day I wonder if the Web editor knows it was The Daily Texan news editor that posted those comments.

I am personally horrified by the amount of information you can find out about people through Google. If I search myself in a people finder, I can find my age, state and city of residence and parents' names (listed under "related people"...yikes!) And while I don't think it's all doom and gloom, I agree with Simson Garfinkel in that we can and need to do something about it. I liked his analogy about the environment and privacy. It was ignorant to think that pollution was an uncontrollable side effect of industry and economic development. Likewise, it's ignorant to think that privacy violation is a side effect of the Internet that we can't do anything about. 

I do think, however, that the privacy issue will result in another digital divide: that between educated Internet users and those not aware of the potential for privacy invasion. And, as pointed out in the first reading, the super savvy (and wealthy) have more sway in getting web content taken down so it won't show up in search results. One of the ways we can "fight back" according to Garfinkel is by "being careful and informed consumers." Well it seems then that the first step to combatting this scary problem is by educating people about it.