Monday, December 22, 2008

I Google You

Here's a video of performance by Amanda Palmer I stumbled on recently (the lyrics):

(found via Google Blogoscoped)

Besides being rather funny, it raises the point that whatever you put online, stays there forever for everyone to see, even years later. In case of social networks, this may even be something written by your friends and not yourself (such as being tagged in a photo on Facebook), and people are known to have been fired over online photos.

On the same subject, there was a case last month where a bartender in New York was fired after she blogged about a drunk Belgian politician that visited the bar she worked in. The politician was dismayed, and called blogging a 'dangerous phenomenon'. This however will only get worse, as more of our lives is being recorded every day. Already almost every new mobile phone has GPS and a camera built in, and I guess only a few years from now we all will carry a device that will record 24/7 our location and everything we see and hear around us, transmitting this to some service that will store this and serve as our personal offline memory.

There's an interesting artice by Bruce Schneier about the effect this has on our lives - The Future of Ephemeral Conversation. Here's a passage from it:
Cardinal Richelieu famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.
So, do you know what Google has to say about you?

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