[Herts] Twitter info? :: we are all doomed

[Mike - XP Computers]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: herts-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:herts-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of local.linux
> Sent: 26 February 2010 23:19
> To: hertslug at mikerobe.org; herts at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Subject: Re: [Herts] Twitter info? :: we are all doomed
>
> <snip>
>
> Now someone with malicious intentions could manually paw through all these

> links and related materials and obtain far more information than I would
ever 
> be comfortable giving out.
> 
> <snip>

All you said.... plus the fact that once it is "out there", you can't ever
take it back again!

I remember hearing a fable told about gossiping, where someone comes to the
wise man in the village to confess that they've been spreading some gossip,
that it's all got out of hand and now they want to fix it all to make
amends, so what should they do. The wise man says, first you must take a
white feather and place it on the doorstep of each person you told, then
come back and see me again tomorrow. The person does that then returns the
next day. The wise man says now you must go and collect all the feather back
in. The person remonstrates and says, but the wind will have spread the
feathers everywhere by now, there is no way I can collect them all... and
the wise man says, exactly, and the same is true of your gossip, you can't
just do something to take it all back now, it is too late...

I thought the story was quite profound when I first heard it, but I don't
mention it here for that reason... I mention it because the internet has a
similar nature to it. Once we have posted something, we can never fully
erase it again. Caches store our words, so they last far longer than we ever
intended! Google has a their own cache, as do thewaybackmachine and probably
many others. Could you ever delete something from the net and reliably say
it was fully gone without a trace? Even if you approached all the main cache
services and asked them to delete something from their cache who knows what
other services have a copy... including the ISP's you uploaded it through
potentially, and the government monitoring services and who knows who else
and for what ends...

If you want to get VERY worried about where it might all end, you only have
to think what might happen if we ever had a Nazi regime like government in
the UK in the future, and what they could find out about each of us from our
internet "fingerprints". That's enough to make you consider never posting
anything again!!! OK, hopefully it will never be that bad, but it is still
worth thinking before we post things on the internet...

Mike