Bradley Robb

As mentioned earlier, I’ve postulated that the YouTube comment might just be the lowest form of the written word. This tragic genre often lacks any sort of tact, substance, or quality, transforming it into the written version of the racist and homophobic rants that linger across headsets of Xbox Live games. While YouTube took a hint from an XKCD comic and instituted an audio playback feature, I think that a specialized version of the Miranda Rights might be more fitting.

“anything that you say can be used against you”

As the internet has moved into the much clichéd Web 2.0, it has become more social. Blogging, microblogging, podcasts, and videocasts have joined the more traditional bulletin boards, personal websites, and online publication to turn the internet into a giant conversation. As users become people, there seems to be an expectation of privacy attached to this new internet experience, as if the internet were simply a virtual café, and those of us online are simply engaging in a long, drawn-out, pub-chat. This analogy falls flat, however, when examined. The primary tenants of a pub-chats – relative anonymity, temporariness, and general privacy – are all lacking when it comes to the new, social internet.

No One in Anonymous

This fact most often comes up in court, which can recently be portrayed via the social engineering of Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email password and the apropos guilty plea of a member of the loose-group Anonymous. Both of these individuals performed questionable deeds online – one the invasion of a private email account, the other a DoS attack on a Church of Scientology websites – but this does not mean that speech said online should be considered anymore untraceable. The same techniques uses to unmask these two individuals can easily be used to determine who, exactly, said what online. This differs greatly from a bar or public place, where identification is usually left to the inexact science of physical identification.

Yes, there are ways to mask one’s identity online. Proxy servers do a fairly good job of masking an IP address, and using multiple proxies is a good method to add layers to the obfuscation of one’s identity. However, ask David Kernell how well the proxy stopped the FBI from discovering his identity. The fact is, simply, that if what you say is severe enough, you can be found.

Nothing is Temporary

Conversations in public, unless recorded, have the luxury of dying into the memories of those involved shortly after the conversation ends. Conversations on the internet, be it on a message board, blog comments, or even the microblogging service Twitter, do not bear this luxury. Once something is published online it is, for all intents and purposes, permanent. Yes, blog posts and twitter messages can easily be deleted, but this deletion only takes place on the server where the content was originally posted. The computers of those who have visited the page and not deleted their cache, the cache servers at search engines, scraper sites, and the Way Back Machine at the Internet Archive all potentially have copies of the exact words, and the ability to influence these machines often falls outside of the power of the average users.

Little is Truly Private

Security-minded personal have a short phrase: security through obscurity – a quick way of saying that merely because something isn’t popular today, doesn’t mean that security flaws do not exist. These flaws merely haven’t been capitalized on yet. The same can be said about online content, no matter where it is posted. If politics and Andy Warhol has taught us anything, everything can become popular, famous, or infamous for very little reason and seemingly without warning. Don’t believe me? A week ago you didn’t know who Joe the Plummer was, nor did you know that he have a tax lien or two against him. The power of the modern search engine, as well as social news aggregation, means that the next big story is constantly being searched for, hunted down and waiting for exposure.

How to Handle Online Privacy

Yeah...like that

An educational test used in an attempt to combat peer pressure is to ask a simple question before performing an act: would I want this published on the front page of the newspaper? Refitting that adage for the internet age: how do I feel now that what I just said is appearing on the front page of a newspaper? Put bluntly, assume no privacy when posting online.

Information posted online, no matter how distributed or obscure, should be considered as done on the record. Yes, as in the newspaper “On the Record.” Why? Because it is. At least it is today. The internet is not a pub-chat. It is not a meeting between friends. It’s a giant, interconnected document in which we are all a part of writing. And it’s here for good.

Of course, this is just the current state. The internet will change, and I’ll get into the why and how in the future.

Tags: online rights, Privacy