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Privacy

NYT Discovers the Panopticon 362

Posted by michael from the stalker's-delight dept.
Erris writes "Should we be surprised at the NYT attacking search engines? This article seeks to blame Google for all privacy loss, as if someone else remembering and sharing the things YOU publish is worse than credit card purchase databases, phone records, credit records being created and shared by OTHERS without your consent. Libraries must really be evil."
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NYT Discovers the Panopticon More

NYT Discovers the Panopticon

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  • First NYT Login Generator Post... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NYTimes Login Generator [majcher.com], which I found thanks to Google. How ironic! :)
    • Looks like they've found a way to block that thing.

      I just created an account with the username slashd0rk / password cheese

      feel free to use it
      • The only thing they changed is that they check if the ZIP code is valid. If it's 99999, then they refuse. Change it to a valid ZIP and it works.
        • The only thing they changed is that they check if the ZIP code is valid. If it's 99999, then they refuse. Change it to a valid ZIP and it works.

          Still doesn't work, with several known valid ZIP codes tested under both Mozilla and IE. The previously-posted account (slashd0rk) doesn't work either. Their site always bitches that your session is no longer valid.

          (I could plug in the username and password that I set up there years ago, but I've been using the random login generator lately out of principle. :-) )

  • Ugh... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RAruler ( 11862 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:47AM (#3949639) Homepage
    When you run a website you have a variety of optiosn available, most reputable search engines will follow a robots.txt, and if your still paranoid after that you can deny access to the ip range of popular search engines. If you aren't willing to do these rather simple things to protect your 'privacy' you shouldn't post things on a website. Who knows what the teaming hordes of 'internet crazy folk' could do when they find my short story, surely they are all deviants and sexual miscreants. I know, i'll get INTERNATIONAL PRESS COVERAGE to make sure that my Privacy remains safe.

    • Re:Ugh... (Score:2, Informative)

      by eNonymous Coward ( 586524 )
      You raise some very good points, and I think the NY Times article is more hype than substance (not that this is surprising). The biggest problem I see, though, isn't peoples' personal webpages being archived... It's when their personal information shows up on another website, perhaps even without their knowledge. In a situation like this, robots.txt isn't an option.

      Something like this happened to me last year and it was very disturbing to say the least. I applied for a job at a local company and sent my resume to them via snailmail. A couple days later someone called to tell me that the job had already been filled, but they'd keep my resume on file for future consideration. Little did I know that "on file" actually meant "typed into a computer and stuck into our HR database which happens to be accidentally accessible through our public website." And little did I know that the data-entry jockey who typed my printed resume into the computer would leave off a zero when entering the part about "10 years of experience."

      I didn't find out about this until several months later, when the hiring manager at another company brought up the discrepancy on the phone. He'd called to schedule an interview, but first he wanted me to explain why another copy of my resume said I only had 1 year of experience. Within a few minutes he'd found and given me the URL. Within an hour, after several phone calls my resume was gone from StupidCo's HR database (and they'd removed the link from the public website). I thought about filing a lawsuit - how many companies had done a "background check," found the other resume, and shitcanned me because they thought I was a liar? - but decided it wasn't worth it.

      The lesson I took from this experience was simple. You have to give out your personal information to other people from time to time, for very valid and legitimate reasons; and no matter how privacy-conscious you are, one of those other people can really fuck it up for you. Here's hoping you find out about it sooner than I did.

      • Re:Ugh... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by ROBOKATZ ( 211768 )
        I guess it would not be a bad idea to periodically search for yourself to try and least be aware of stuff like this.

    • It's not always that simple... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nurightshu ( 517038 ) <rightshu@cox.net> on Thursday July 25, 2002 @04:41AM (#3950030) Homepage Journal

      About two years ago, I read an article from the Washington Post by a Dr. Cindy Williams of MIT, formerly of the Congressional Budget Office, who stated that she felt that military personnel were adequately compensated -- and in many cases overpaid -- for the jobs they do. The Post included her e-mail address, so I decided to write a response to that. At the time, I was in the Air Force myself, and the son of a 26-year Air Force veteran, so what she said understandably got my dander up a bit.

      Since my father forwarded me a copy of the article, I figured I'd send him a copy of my response as well. This was a mistake; he actually liked what I wrote and forwarded it to some of his friends, who sent it to their friends, and so on ad nauseum.

      Now it's been archived on a number of different websites, and I have no control over my own words. There are two glaring changes that have been made to what I wrote, and someone added to the message that Dr. Cindy Williams is the same Cindy Williams from "Laverne and Shirley." That's landed me on all the urban legend websites, like Snopes [snopes.com], About.com [about.com], and Truthminers [truthminers.com]. I don't own those websites, so anyone can go to them and discover that I was dumb enough not to keep my fool mouth shut in spring of 2000.

      If you're really interested in finding the letter (which means you're either mentally ill or have a lot of free time on your hands), do a Google search for "A1C Michael Bragg". Ugh.

  • Perhaps... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by spookysuicide ( 560912 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:47AM (#3949640) Homepage
    Perhaps the New York Times should take their database of archived articles off line, since some of the people depicted in their stories would probably prefer if other people couldn't read about certain things they did.

    This is a ridculous way to look at privacy.

    • Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by joeykiller ( 119489 )
      Even though I agree that this is a ridicilous way to look at privacy, I think it would be more interesting to look at the "Google cache problem" from a copyright point of view.

      That they make copyrighted material from others sites - even dead sites - available trough the cache on their site, raises a lot of interesting questions:

      - Do they breach copyright by presenting cached content? (I think they do)

      - The Google cache is causing publishers to lose control over their material.

      - In some cases publishers update articles, corrects errors or even remove articles from the web for different reasons (from deals that states that some content shall only be availiable in X days, to cease and desist orders). But if the content is indexed by Google, it's still available for the general public. In these cases the Google cache is publishing content that the author/copyright holder doesn't want to be puslished.

      • Re:Perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)

        by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @04:09AM (#3949967) Journal
        - Do they breach copyright by presenting cached content? (I think they do)

        I doubt it. It presents the information with the owner's names/copyright, and even with an original URL to point to so you can get to the source if it gets back online again.

        - The Google cache is causing publishers to lose control over their material.

        What about archive.org then? No, publishes don't lose control. The cache gets updated quite frequently.

      • Re:Perhaps... (Score:2, Informative)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        The Google cache isn't permanent. Some time (a few weeks?) after the original site goes, it will disappear too.

        However, the Wayback Machine [archive.org] IS permanent, though you can have stuff removed (or, more precisely, not publicly accessible).

      • Re:Perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by actiondan ( 445169 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @07:13AM (#3950280)
        The Google cache is causing publishers to lose control over their material.

        In Britain, publishers are required by law to send a copy of everything they publish to the British Library in London. I'm not sure if the USA has anything similar but libraries exist pretty much everywhere.

        Does having these copies available to the public at the British Library cause the publishers to 'lose control over their material'?

        Does someone who puts information out into the public domain have the right to withdraw that information whenever they like? I don't think so.

        • Re:Perhaps... (Score:2, Interesting)

          by joeykiller ( 119489 )
          In Britain, publishers are required by law to send a copy of everything they publish to the British Library in London. I'm not sure if the USA has anything similar but libraries exist pretty much everywhere.
          And that's okay! But Google isn't a library, and there isn't a law that require web sites to send their material to Google.
          Does someone who puts information out into the public domain have the right to withdraw that information whenever they like? I don't think so.
          Publishing something on an internet site doesn't nescessarily mean that you put the information into the public domain, just as you don't give New York Post the right to publish an article just because your article has been published in the New York Times the day before.

          You don't give away the right to redistribute by publishing something, unless you explicitly state this. The copyright laws applies on the Internet, just as they do with printed media.
          • But Google isn't a library, and there isn't a law that require web sites to send their material to Google.
            But what about the libraries that don't have laws to force publishers to submit content? Are they stealing the publishers right to control their content by allowing the public to read books, even those that have been withdrawn by the publisher?

            Should publishers have the right to have their books removed from all libraries whenever they like?

            Perhaps a law requiring publishers of online content to submit it to online archives might not be a bad thing...
            Publishing something on an internet site doesn't nescessarily mean that you put the information into the public domain, just as you don't give New York Post the right to publish an article just because your article has been published in the New York Times the day before.
            Okay, bad choice of words with 'public domain' but I still think that somone who publishes information publically should not have the right to recall that content whenever they please. Stealing content is wrong but caching content is not the same thing (Should the NYT have the right to force you to empty your broswer cache of NYT sourced content at any time? Should they be able to demand that proxy servers empty their cache at any time?)

            Google doesn't republish the material in the way that you are implying (i.e. by claiming it as their own)- they provide access to a cache of the content, labeling it's origin clearly and provide a link to the original content. In my mind, this is more analogous to the activities of a public library than it is to one newspaper stealing content from another.

            Libraries store newspapers on microfilm for research purposes. Why should this not extend to electronic content?

            Electronic content introduces many complications to this sort of issue. Libraries traditionally have provided a way for everyone to get access to content. How can this ability be protected when we are talking about electronic content?

          • You don't give away the right to redistribute by publishing something, unless you explicitly state this. The copyright laws applies on the Internet, just as they do with printed media.

            But, by making it available online for free, you allow anybody to download it and keep a copy. Sucks, but that's kinda what the purpose of the internet is.

            Don't like it? Have a clue [clever.net].
    • that many people are confusing privacy with anonimity. If you want to have privacy, don't go to a public place. If you want your information private, don't post it on a website.

  • OH gee (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mizhi ( 186984 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:49AM (#3949646)
    Let's see, you put your information in a public forum such as the web and you expect it not to be indexed? Gee golly willickers and shucks, Mr. Peabody, people sure are stupid.

    You want privacy? Don't put a fucking webpage up. Now the distinction between credit card companies and the rest of the ill-begotten like minded ilk is well taken. I didn't do anything other than purchase somethings using that credit card, and yet, they can sell my information to any Tom Dick and Harry that wants to know my underwear purchasing habits?

    Fuck them. NYT has ceased to be an informative source of news for a while. And it has never been a source of unbiasednews.
    • Read the article genius. People often don't have control of their name being put online, or they chatted once in a newsgroup and it now bites them in the ass because name=association with handle, for years, possibly. HIndsight is 20/20, in the meantime who's fault is that?
      • Well, there's always foresight, of course. But the Internet seems to be breeding a new kind of techno-idiot: a consumer who's supremely confident of their understanding of online transactions and relationships, while at the same time blissfully ingorant of how the whole thing really works.

        These people remind me of teenagers who have just received their driver's permits, and are now convinced that they have the driving skill of Mario Andretti combined with the mechanical skill of Mario's pit crew. Then, when they rear-end somebody, they complain that there should have been more cops around to prevent the accident.

      • Fair enough, if someone's posting with your name then there's no protection against that. The thing is, the article's saying that these ppl have put info about themselves on websites, thereby putting that info in the public domain, and then they're surprised when other ppl read it! I mean, duh! Maybe with hindsight they shouldn't have posted this stuff on their websites, but it's their own fault and not anyone else's. If I screw something up, I'm not going to blame Google for what I've messed up myself.

        The other big duh! is that they say ppl are searching on a name and assuming there's only one person with that name. With 6 billion ppl in the world, chances are that at least one of them will have your name, unless you're called something really obscure like Zebulon Zachariah Zarquon of course! ;-) Hell, if someone won't date me bcos they've confused me with someone else with my name off the web, I'd think myself lucky that I didn't have to meet someone who was obviously as thick as a builder's yard full of short planks.

        Grab.

  • Google? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 )
    If they think that google caches are bad... The caches go down a while after the website disappears...

    Then there's Archive.org... Until a squatter with a robots.txt takes the domain, it's there forever if it's there!
  • Its been said before, it will be said again! The fact that it is posted on NYTimes is mildly amusing (with their registration and all) but really when all is said in done the percentage of things you can find on the net that is not wanted up there by the individual it is about in which the individual or his/her family members did not post is absolutely minute.

    Is Privacy a good thing? YES!!! is posting a family website up on the net and being suprised when someone else finds it Hypocritical? YES!!!!

    I mean yes there is more to it then that but my 2000 word essay hours are between 9-5

  • Its an innocent article (Score:5, Interesting)

    by benzapp ( 464105 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:53AM (#3949657)
    While I think there is merit to the suggestion that the New York Times has a vested interest in criticizing search engines and internet archives in general, that conclusion cannot be drawn from the article at hand. The article makes a very valid point, that many people unwittingly put a lot of personal information on the net and it ends up being forever available on the internet.

    For those who read this site, I am sure no one is going to leave anything important in a directory accessible via http, but it can easily happen. How many ridiculous personal websites are there out there, how many inexperienced folks with frontpage put something stupid on geocities before they figure out what is going on? It can happen so very easily.

    Note, I don't think there is a way around this problem. The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index. I don't know if that is feasible, but it is a thought. In the end, I think this is something people are going to have to be more aware of... only the ignorant or careless are going to get burned by this.

    On a personal level, I have searched for my name in the past, and found some interesting personal files and info... I won't be too specific, but this info was temporarily placed on other machines to access via http as that was the only way I could download anything to certain school machines. The shit was only on those servers for a few days, and it is still in the google cache. Nothing to important, but it has been there for YEARS now.

    • Re:Its an innocent article (Score:5, Informative)

      by RedWizzard ( 192002 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:09AM (#3949710)
      The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index.
      It's more about the cache than the results list, but still Google will remove your site from the cache and/or the results list. Details here [google.com]. I can imagine some search engines are not as webmaster-friendly as Google, but most of them are fairly reasonable. It's certainly pretty unfair of this article to target Google.
    • Note, I don't think there is a way around this problem. The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index. I don't know if that is feasible, but it is a thought.

      A thought others had and solved long ago:
      For individual pages: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOARCHIVE">
      And if WYSIWYWG web authoring software doesn't make this feature easily accessible to it's dumb users, is that Googles fault? I think not. The NOINDEX meta tag has been around longer than Google, it was already supported by Altavista even before Google existed.

      Along the same line, if the NYT webmaster is to dumb to know about the robots exclusion standard [robotstxt.org], they should probably fire him or get him educated. But in any case they should stop whining. The search engine operators certainly give them more than plenty of options to control the indexing/archiving of their content, even though they could simply consider it public and not care at all.

      After all, do they have any control over their printed issue? Oh gosh, someone could actually collect all these printed newspapers and after 50 years come back with something the NYT said in a nasty article and would rather have forgotten!

      Summary: if you publish you should expect people to read and remember. Why is this even news?

      • The fact that there is a standard way of preventing search engines trawling through the site is a start, but that doesn't help newbies who aren't aware of this. Do you remember a time when you were first learning about web pages? Was your first though "I wonder how I'll stop search engines archiving my attempt"? I know mine wasn't. There are loads of people out there that play around with their own personal sites and quite possibly don't realise this archiving happens. It's not "the fault" of Google, and Google may well offer a method of removing these caches, but unless the users aren't aware of the issue (and many of these are *shock horror* not computer nerds and don't spend much of their waking lives reading techie site - they just want to put a lovely picture of their kids up for all the world to see), they don't know to go check to make sure they haven't accidentally left something stupid or embarassing floating in Google's cache.

        It's not fair to attack Google for this, but it is reasonable for a non-techie paper to report on the potential risks.

    • hmmmm..

      Surely the whole point of the internet was to make your data (be it scientific data, your family tree or your pr0n collection...) publicly available. Complaining that the internet works as it was designed to is just plain stupid!

      The Google Cache questions is an interesting one though. Yes the cache will remove data if a site dies (after a certain length of time), but it still does store your data. But is this really a problem? I know people (and read the stories about others on /.) who have managed to delete their ~/www and then recover large chunks of it from the google cache. Is the google cache really any different than someone who just saved a local copy of your page or site anyway?

      Anyway IMO it comes down to a very simple choice:
      Do you want world and dog to see your site?
      if Yes -> stick it on the net
      if No -> Protect it with a password, or just as simply DON'T PUT IT ON THE NET
    • only the ignorant or careless are going to get burned by this.

      Right, and unless one sprang from the forehead of Zeus as a god of wisdom, everyone is or was or will be ignorant or careless at sometime in their life.

  • A few observations.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Da VinMan ( 7669 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:54AM (#3949661)
    #1 - If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.

    #2 - Google (and others I'm sure) do all of us a great service by caching the last known good copy of a site. Then when we /. (this is the only punctuation-only phrase I would ever use as a verb by the way) the site, we can (usually) still see it. Please consider the value of this service for your sake, and posterity's before you rant about of all the precious privacy we've lost.

    #3 - What's in a name anyway? It's just an identifier. We could all just as well be numbered for all the real value that a name contains. What are you without your name? Still you, right? So why do you need a name, other than for identification purposes which is directly tied to our seeming need for ownership of resources? Don't forget, you are not your identifiers, or circumstances. You will always be you no matter the circumstances. At least, that's true until you die... then you are still what you will be. But before you get stressed out by that, I urge you to consider what you were before you were born. Remember that? Me neither. No point in stressing out about it then, eh?

    #4 - Do not post to /. after imbibing respectable amounts of alcoholic beverages. Just trust me on that.
    • If you don't want information about yourself to be public, then don't make it public. No I'm not trolling. How difficult can this be? It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.

      It wasn't always so black and white, public or not. Back in the day I could have a personal website known only to me and a few friends. Maybe certain industrious investigators could discover it, but not many would. Now, I have to assume that any information I would put there is public knowledge, easily accessible by anyone who knows my name.

      As a kind of parlor trick, I amuse myself and give my friends the willies just using Google and telling them about themselves. With only a nickname or an email address, I can find phone numbers, addresses, and past histories. Frequently, much this information was not placed on the net by the person themselves or is no longer under their control.

      I completely agree that Google has had a net positive effect on how we use the net, but you can't ignore the impact it's had on privacy. There's no correct answer here; the easier it is for you to find information, the easier it is to find information about you.
      • As a kind of parlor trick, I amuse myself and give my friends the willies just using Google and telling them about themselves. With only a nickname or an email address, I can find phone numbers, addresses, and past histories. Frequently, much this information was not placed on the net by the person themselves or is no longer under their control.

        Hmmm...seeing as how I've never experienced this hijacking of info and being put on the net, I'm a bit confused. After being on the WWW for many years now, a Google search on my email address (and my previous 3, dating back to around 1994) simply turns up mailing list/discussion board postings. At most you'd find out I atteneded the University of Florida (and by extension, probably lived in Gainesville, FL) at one point in time.

        Is it just that FL is woefully inadequate in posting these "easily accessible" gov't public records on the net? Or is it that your friends like to post their personal details on public websites?

      • Google can not, and will not "guess" an URL of a site that has no one pointing at him. If you publish and do not advertise or link to your page it is as good as not published (as long as it is not the top page). Now if someone links to your page, then it could get there.
    • It can't be a violation of your 'privacy' if you don't post the material in question in the first place.

      also (from the article:)

      Waqaas Fahmawi, 25, used to sign petitions freely when he was in college. "In the past you would physically sign a petition and could confidently know that it would disappear into oblivion," said Mr. Fahmawi, a Palestinian-American who works as an economist for the Commerce Department.

      But after he discovered that his signatures from his college years had been archived on the Internet, he became reluctant to sign petitions for fear that potential employers would hold his political views again him.

      He feels stifled in his political expression. "The fact I have to think about this," he said, "really does show we live in a system of thought control."

      First, to me personally, the way the world would run without assumed privacy is much better. (By assumed privacy, I'm referring to the belief that, by default, all actions are private. In my mind, all actions are public unless I make an effort to make them private. Ergo, what I'm saying is that I think privacy is necessary (i.e. passwords, etc.) but that it should never be assumed.) I think that once people realize that everyone is fallible and has done dumb things in their past, it'll alleviate a lot of stress in the world--privacy makes a lot of guilt.

      Second, some of the things I live my life by are: you can't undo what you've done; align your actions with what you really believe; and no lie is air-tight. I think all those things are good things to believe in, and if everyone believed them too (ha ha) then assumed privacy wouldn't be necessary. Basically, I don't have any reservations about forcing everyone to take responsibility for their actions and thereby (gulp ... fingers crossed) making everyone a bit more humble and forgiving. I know it doesn't follow, but I think that's the way it would work: there would be some people who lead their lives to infallible perfection, but I cannot believe that would be a majority and I cannot believe that minority would be in charge somehow, so the majority would be in power and prone to err which would allow everyone to live pretty freely.

      Of course maybe this will come back to haunt me someday and I'll have completely changed my mind ...

  • great for interviews (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Darth_Burrito ( 227272 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:55AM (#3949662)
    Every time I go into an interviewer knowing the name, company, or email address of the interviewer, I will always look them up via google and deja, just to see what turns up. Once I found that the president of the startup company I was interviewing for had built a couple websites on commission and then spammed the hell out of several newsgroups in order to boost hits.

    If you put stuff out there on the net, then you're stuck with it out there.

  • Attacking who? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Robotech_Master ( 14247 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:55AM (#3949664) Homepage Journal
    It didn't look to me as though they were so much attacking the search engine per se, as they were simply commenting on it. Or that they were "attacking" anything, really--that's just the story submitter's slant.

    The problem is more far-reaching than just search engines, anyway; after all, nobody could find the stuff if all the individual websites didn't have it on-line. Personally, I find it kind of reassuring...if I have descendants, they'll be able to find out all about me long after I'm gone by browing through the old web files, reading my livejournal entries and USENET posts, and so on.

    I have always been aware that search engines could turn up things you'd rather not have seen...back when the search engines first came out, a friend of mine was chagrinned to find, when he searched on his own name, the majority of the results related to an old piece of Vampire fanfiction that he'd sent to a mailing list with about four people on it, and had thought to be safely dead and buried--and hardly anything was linked to his more recent, more professional writings. That taught me a valuable object lesson right then and there...if you're going to do something on the 'net that you don't want people linking with your name, do it anonymously. Web email services come in very handy for that sort of thing...
  • I am shocked. Why wasn't I told that people can read things that I publish on the web!

    I think it is time that our legislators dealt with this problem. We need laws that require me to inform myself what information I am storing about myself and how I will use it, because clearly, self-regulation isn't working!

  • The New York Times isn't attacking search engines (Score:5, Insightful)

    by guttentag ( 313541 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @01:59AM (#3949680) Journal
    It's simply pointing out to its readers -- many of whom may be intelligent and opinionated but not computer literate by slashdot standards -- that when you publish something on the Web, anyone can see it.

    This may seem like common sense to you and I, but when Slashdot recently posted a story about groups.google.com, a number of postings were of a "I never thought those postings would come back to haunt me" nature.

    Basically, the article says nothing new for us but the submitter of this story appears bent on hyping it up as an "attack" on search engines.

    • This may seem like common sense to you and I, but when Slashdot recently posted a story about groups.google.com, a number of postings were of a "I never thought those postings would come back to haunt me" nature.

      I was probably one of many that thought that, but hey, it's fun to see how naive and full of vitriol I was a few years back. Those old immature posts of mine on USENET from quite a few years back amuse the hell out of me. I can see how much I've 'grown' over the years. It amuses the hell out of me.

      I myself am quite an open person, and I generally don't really care what people can dredge up about me on search engines. I hope they do, that way they can get to know me better in a way.

      Ms. Crick shouldn't get her panties in a knot. That's the way this big humongous public network works. You publish information, and hey presto, it's public. Heck, typing your name in a search engine is also a good way to see what other people are saying about you. I sometimes ego-search, yes, but usually to see if people link to my website, or comment on stuff I said or did. How convenient that google also indexes mailing list archives :)

  • Ignornace (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kwikymart ( 90332 )
    With the progression of technology, why are people so suprised? The Internet has been a complete mess of fragmented information for years and only now has it begun to show signs of unifying. It is narrow minded thinking to say that nobody could find all the information you published on the Internet and link it to you. I think this is more of a problem with people not thinking things through when they release seemingly harmless things that may end up to bite them in the ass later. Privacy, in this case, is the result of the practice of not being a bone-head.

  • Yawn... (Score:3, Informative)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:00AM (#3949682)
    How hard is it to use meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" in your page head?
    This way search engines should not index you.

    PS It's not yelling, it's called HTML, you lame lameness filter.

  • I'm safe. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Soko ( 17987 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:02AM (#3949683) Homepage
    Searched for my full name on Google and got 6 hits. 2 of them weren't even me.

    Then I searched for my nick-name. I think I emptied the whole Google cache on one query - millions of pages dedicated to Soko-ban game, arts stuff and other assorted pages not realted to me at all.

    Woo-hoo! I'm safe!!!....

    [Thinks for a minute]

    *snif* I'm depressed. I'm so un-important that I can't even be found on the web by Google, the great privacy invader...

    Soko

  • Who's worried? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Restil ( 31903 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:02AM (#3949685) Homepage
    The second you put information up on a public site, you can expect that this data will be archived, cached, linked to, and lo and behold, people might actually FIND this information by searching on you.

    And google isn't the enemy here. If you don't want your site listed on google, NO PROBLEM. Just place the required information in robots.txt and you'll never hear from them again. And if google accidently links a bunch of your pages you don't want the world finding, a single request to them will remove all references, promptly with no questions asked.

    As for privacy, its very simple. If you want people to know something about you, be as public with it as you want. If you don't want people to know something, then by all means, don't put that information on a public website. Are people really so deluded to think that nobody will ever find the information they post publically? Yet people seem more than happy to post intimate details of their lives for the whole world to see. I really don't think they care, and more importantly, I doubt anyone else does either.

    -Restil

  • Don't forget Usenet... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pycnanthemum ( 175351 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:02AM (#3949686) Homepage Journal
    People post questions in newsgroups all the time and use their real names. Of course now that Google owns the Usenet archives, I guess that is their fault too. :-)

    The general public is clueless about the lack of privacy on the internet. I can't even count the number of times I have surprised people by telling them how much information about them is logged by every website they visit, that web browsers keep a history of sites visited, etc.

    The issue here is not that the NYT is telling us what we already know, because of course /. users are well-versed in the ways of the internet. If the article builds awareness about invasion of privacy, and makes general computer users more cautious, then it has done us all a service.

  • *Snort* (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:03AM (#3949687) Homepage Journal
    Why do you think I use a nickname when posting on Slashdot?

    Why do you think my "homepage"on Slashdot resolves to a free web page that has not been updated for years? A web page that contains no real tangible personal information whatsoever?

    Why do you think my "email address" resolves to a free email address on Yahoo?

    Why do you think I do the same for almost every forum I participate in?

    Only a few people, using Google or other search engines, would be able to guess who I am -- and these are probably my closest friends. And even them would probably have a hard time guessing it was me.

    Come on, people, blaming Google for a lack of privacy is as stupid as saying that Microsoft will save us from wily hackers with Palladium.

    No Privacy? No problem. Just maintain a couple of anonymous online clone and post using "their" names. And, yes, I did register with the NYT using the same nickname... =)
    • Only a few people, using Google or other search engines, would be able to guess who I am

      Why are you so afraid to be associated with the words you publish?

      Don't get me wrong, I think there are good reasons for anonymity in many situations, but not for every public statement you make, unless you really aren't willing to stand behind your words.... I don't think it's a privacy issue the way you make it out to be; after all we are talking about archived web pages and usenet posts, not email. Presumably you are posting to the web because you want people to read what you have to say, no?

  • I remember on guy on the Well went through and destroyed all of his old postings because it had reached this point, that it was no longer restricted to the community, but was now starting to be of a wider import. And because it might be embarrassing in his later career.

    it was sad in a way...

  • Fickle Press (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bovril ( 260284 ) <{centreneptune} {at} {yahoo.com.au}> on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:08AM (#3949703) Homepage
    I'm sure if Camberley Crick was a teenage starlet, politician or a topless sunbathing member of the Royal Family, this would fall in to the public's right to know category.

    But because she writes educational games (2 words that should never be seen together) it's an invasion of privacy story.

  • This reminds me about my girlfriend, she searched her name on the web and found p0rn.
    Since I write web pages too, she immediately assumed that I made this page with here name between all the naked girls. She almost left me and it took some time until she understood what happened.
    Now I need to be aware that she will find this post, and will be angry again because I blamed her at /.
  • Whenever was the Web an *innocent place*? 1995: already gilded by time.

  • In the beginning... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by syd02 ( 595787 )
    it seems like geeks built an internet that reflected their values and needs, then they showed other people what it was and what it could become.

    Everybody was excited...wow, an information revolution.

    It seems like the people who always tend to get what they want are beginning to decide that they never really wanted an information revolution, and now we're seeing the counter-revolution.
  • It's very common to 'google' someone, and the phrase seems to have fallen into general use - particularly among the e-dating crowds. I have a few friends who date over the net and it's very common practice to type a potential date's name into Google to see what pops up.
  • Indeed, a generic name is what Beth Roberts, 29, was seeking when she changed back from her married name, Werbick, after a divorce. A Google search on "Beth Werbick" returns results only about her. But a search for "Beth Roberts" returns thousands upon thousands of Web pages. "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.
    Now, of course, the next thing lil' Beth does is trumpet her clever change of personality in the NEW YORK TIMES.

    Sometimes you gotta wonder, really...

  • Michael discovers Bentham (Score:3, Funny)

    by nosferatu-man ( 13652 ) <spamdot@homonculus.net> on Thursday July 25, 2002 @02:31AM (#3949769) Homepage
    What's next? Pudge on John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"? CmdrTaco dissecting "A History Of Sexuality"? The intersection of academe and Slashdot is too terrible to imagine ...

    'jfb
  • I am going to start boycotting NYT by refusing to visit their site and bad mouthing them at every opportunity..... oh wait..... I already do that......

    - HeXa
  • But beware of date and relevency ordered search results... ;^).

    Try searching for "terry lambert" on google. You will find ~17,600 entries.

    My God! What happened to the other 4/5ths?!?

    Actually, fully 5% of that is probably some other "Terry Lambert", and not me... 8-).

    As a general rule to live by, never send a "letter to the editor", never send an email, never keep (or even *create* in the first place) a file, never make a posting to a news group or a message board, never post your resume, never post your job history, never criticise the company you work for or your managers, never put useless or derogatory comments in your source code, never ... etc. etc. ...unless you want it to become a matter of public record.

    If you are a jerk in private email, but nice in public email, expect that people will eventually know your true face, even if no one every intentionally "violates nettiquite".

    -- Terry
  • The article raises valid points about the lack of privacy on the net. Yet it is technicaly lacking. It should inform people that it is possible to be annonymous on the net. It is also possible with the help of public key encryption to make sure that nobody can impersonate you, while being completely annonymous.

    What i dont like about the article is that it scares people with technology without telling them that the technology does offer a way to solve their problems.
  • A couple of weeks ago I entered my name on google and found that it accurately noted my current address, current telephone, and listed things such as my obnoxiously pretentious postings to a cyberpunk mailing list in the early 90's, advice on how to properly use cu-seeme for an early porn reflector, a couple of rather graphically violent short stories published in someone else's zine, and the random, near-libelous kvetching of an ex who thought of many interesting and practical uses for my still twitching corpse. A couple of small and slightly embarrassing appearances I made in the national media were also noted.

    I really have no control over the appearance of any of the above. My name is relatively unique and therefore almost everything from google was definitely originating from me or was about me; my mailing list postings which can be definitely tracked were from my uni days when I was required to have my real name on the net account.

    I'm not necessarily bothered by the presence of any of this data. I've asked that my address be removed and it seems as if it has. Any employer or potential partner, who is going to hold my ten year old musings against me, can kindly piss off and I hope they will enjoy an early demise. However, I can certainly understand how some of the article's subjects would feel a great fear and paranoia, especially when they have no control over their appearance on random petitions or various articles.

    Google is a double-edged sword and I certainly don't hold their unease against them. Life has certainly been made much easier for stalkers and your office's gossip and that is not necessarily a good thing, despite all the other extraordinary benefits of Google.

    I suppose I am a bit of a hypocrite; I confess I used Google to verify that my current gf wasn't Republican, a copyright lawyer, or an escaped ax murderer. Two out of three wasn't a bad result even though the chainsaws have to be kept under lock and key at all times.

  • good grief (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <`nomadicworld' `at' `gmail.com'> on Thursday July 25, 2002 @03:11AM (#3949845) Homepage
    It was an article pointing out the fact that a lot of personal data has entered the web, and it's hard to erase. What the hell is the matter with you people? Can't you tell the difference between a news or feature article and an editorial? And what's with the mindlessly combative tone? "Should we be surprised at the NYT attacking search engines?" When has the NYT come out against search engines? This makes absolutely no sense.

    as if someone else remembering and sharing the things YOU publish is worse than credit card purchase databases, phone records, credit records being created and shared by OTHERS without your consent

    Where does it say that the examples the article cites are WORSE than credit card purchase databases, phone records, or credit records?

    The way this story submission was phrased made no sense whatsoever.
  • Hmm... they're ones to complain about privacy... Here's the story [majcher.com] via The NYT Random Login Generator [majcher.com]

    It doesn't work for me in Konq, so I log in as 10101/10101. Does it work for anyone else, or did the NYT catch on?

  • A suprise? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jokerghost ( 467848 )
    Why should this come as a shock to anyone? The information that was posted, was posted by the author in a public domain.

    The internet, in it's current incarnation, was created to be a public domain of knowledge, freely accessable by anyone who had the will to retrieve the data. She willingly put up her 5th grade story of the turtle, as well as a slew of other data. Why, then, does she have the right to complain when someone does a simple search and retrieves it? Should I complain if I put a billboard advertising my name, along with my resume, and a short story I wrote, and someone happens to actually read it? This is simply ludicrious. The argument attempting to be made is, if a person willingly posts something using their name, in a public domain, they should still have complete anonyminity. This, I find rediculous... As an aside, geneology records have been freely available for decades. Just ask the Latter Day Saints, who happen to have the largest collection of geneological records (not just of LDS people, either) in the country. The fact that someone simply added functionality by placing the database on the web does not mean that searching it was wrong.

    The second issue raised, however, is perhaps the more important one. If a person deletes content, for fear of repraisal, etc, then that content should be deleted. I belive this applies only to the individual, and his/her personally controlled sites, however... For example, if I post my resume online, then recieve a slew of calls from unsavory characters, then remove the resume, the resume should no longer exist on the internet. Google shouldn't be caching personal webpages like that.... However, we must also realize that once something is posted on the internet, it is, more or less, in the public domain. What the public chooses to do with the information posted is up to the public. Ergo, if I post my resume, and some schmuck copies it a thousand times and disseminates it to all of his buddies, too bad for me. I posted in a public forum.

    The main thing for us to remember, though, is that we live in a society where the notion of property rights of the individual vs the benefit gained by the community is being raised and challenged. In my huble opinion, if the rights of the individual don't cause harm to the community and benefit the individual, we should side with the individual (removal of a resume for instance)-- all other instances, we should side with the benefit of the community.

    -jokerghost
  • As many have noted, the Random NYT Login Generator [majcher.com] is not working. The block they seem to have implemented is based on the referer (yes, I know the right spelling. Trying looking at the HTTP header).

    To get around this problem, simply save the page to your hard drive, and open it from there. Your referer will now be some file:// URL, and it will work.

  • Wrong (Score:4, Informative)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @03:32AM (#3949885) Homepage Journal
    "You can't remove pieces of yourself from the Web," Ms. Crick said.

    You can always request to remove index and cache from Google [google.com], provided that you owned the original.

    But it's already too late, in a brief moment after you chose to feature your shiny story in NYT, cool dudes around the world has already mirrored [slashdot.org] everything about you. Sweetie.


  • Of my name, there exist several variations, and few have the same as I. My last name is also not common.

    I come from a *realy* small country (less that 1/2 million people) and one letter in my first name only exists in my native language..

    Needless to say, I am the only person in the world that has this combination of first/last name..

    And yes, Google serves as my diary ;-)

  • NYT archives (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BinBoy ( 164798 )

    Doesn't the NYT report on everything from births to marriages to arrests and don't they have archives going back decades? Seems a bit hypocritical.

    How to download music, movies and pictures while you sleep. [binaryboy.com]

  • ...just change your name by deed poll to something common, like "John Smith" or "Jim Brown". They'll never be able to tie anything to you then"

  • My fist reaction (Score:3, Interesting)

    by karlm ( 158591 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @04:27AM (#3950000) Homepage
    ... was "d'uh.. people published that stuff, what did they expect?". I still think Google should cache as much as they want, especially if they follow robots.txt. (Not following robots.txt is a bit rude, but if you're not implementing acess controls for the general public, why should Google be any different?)

    Then I remembered one of my fraternity Brothers. At MIT, Freshmen (things change drastically in the Fall of 2002) pretty much decide durring their first week in Boston where they're going to live for the next 4 years, this includes pledging fraternities. To make things less chaotic, each MIT fraternity sends an information packet out to each incomming freshman male and print out lots more to have on hand durring the week of rush. The information packet needs to be finished by the end of the term. One Brother (let's call him Joe) was too busy at the end of the term to put much thought into the personal bio blurb required from each Brother. He thought he'd force the editors to completely rewrite hsi bio from scratch by making it too awful to print. He listed his interests as "Chinese eating, Chinese sleeping, midget tossing, anorexic women with low self esteem, and bovine necrophillia". The editors called his bluff and put his bio, unedited, in the Rush mailer. The rush mailler got transferred into electronic form. Luckily, I jut checked Google for his bio and got no hits. His name only shows 30 hits, half of which are him. It's not really bad, but might cause some flags to go up with sme potential employers/potential inlaws, particualrly since all of the other bios were completely serious and normal. Some stuff you write as a joke may someday end up in big glossy pages and online where it seems in context, but is totally out of context.

    Some day you may wish something about you was never online. Oh well, you can't do anything about it.

  • Some months back I made a database of information available to the public. I did this because the person who controlled the yahoo-group where the info came from decided to take it offline and make it a paid service. I took exception to making information freely given into a commercial product.

    The information contained reviews of translation agencies (basically, how long did they take to pay for services - the translation industry is notorious for not paying). Each submission required the real name of the person who posted the data. This was to prevent someone from anonymously libeling a company.

    When I made the data public, a small, but extremely vocal group made all kinds of legal threats because I had posted their "personal" information (one cheese-eating surrender monkey threatened to hire a Parisian lawyer and toss me in jail - yeah, right). For some reason these idiots felt their names, business addresses, business phone numbers, and business email addresses were somehow private.

    I googled a handful of the loudest complainers just to see the results. Not only did I find their business contact information, but I also found some interesting other tidbits such as home addresses and phone numbers, CVs, school projects, and more.

    I took the data offline, but not because of the legal threats. They had no legal weight. My limited bandwidth, however, was screaming in agony from the large number of hits from the people who appreciated me making the data available. I had experienced a mini-slashdotting. I hope I never experience the real thing.

    I did learn one thing. People will go to unusual lengths to convince themselves that information posted on the internet is private.
  • What I find more disturbing is that she has taken it upon herself to try to teach others about computer/Internet/OS platforms.
  • A couple of quotes (from the second page):

    "I would have plausible deniability if someone wanted to attribute something to me," said Ms. Roberts, who lives in Austin, Tex.

    In other words, she wants to be able to pretend she didn't say something that she said.

    Mr. Fahmawi, the economist, said he envied the ability to be a name in the crowd. "If I had a more generic name, I'd sign petitions with impunity," he said.

    Isn't the whole point of signing petitions that you're saying, "I wish to stand up and be counted as having such-and-such an opinion"?

    It strikes me that these people are afraid of who they are and what they believe in. If you don't wish your view on a topic to be known, don't sign a petition - but then don't complain that your views aren't being heard. If someone confronts me with an opinion I've expressed on the web somewhere, I'm quite happy to either admit I was wrong and have now changed my mind, or give the reasons why I still hold that opinion.

    Jon

  • And the web is a publication medium when looked at it this way.

    And consider writing something in a mailing list a publication too. A lot of mailing lists have archives in the strangest places.. sometimes because someone sets up an archive for private use but forgets to block that archive from prying eyes (and I don't mean blocking by not linking to it or putting a robots.txt there, but blocking with a good .htaccess file).

    The best sample was when I did a websearch for my own name [google.com] and found that someone had a web-archive of all private mail, including stuff I exchanged with him. Found some interesting bits there.. the archive is now gone.

    I got reactions about my homepage [idefix.net] that I am very open. I still limit what I write there to stuff that I want friends / enemies / employers to see.

    And employers will see stuff. Some manager with way too much time on her/his hands might stumble on some page where you declare that you don't like stupid managers bugging you during the day and start whining at your boss. (been there, done that)

  • Taking responsibility for what you wrote (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lpontiac ( 173839 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @05:40AM (#3950156)

    A lot of people seem to be terrified of the concept that in 20 years time, anyone with access to search/archival services and the inclination will be able to access all of the stuff they've said and published. Everything. Not quoted in part or paraphrased, but an exact copy as it came from the horse's mouth.

    People want to be able to hide this information away, to disown it, to take their name off it, to dismiss it as a fabrication or a misquote.

    I think it stems from the fact that nobody's perfect, but for some reason society has some mean doublethink happening - we know nobody's perfect but we still expect them to appear to be perfect! It used to be that if you were judicious about where you said things, and to who, your mistakes could be quickly retracted and covered up before they were preserved in some indelible form. This isn't the case when you put something on a web page.

    Personally, I'm looking forward to where this is heading.. "people aren't perfect" won't just be the theory, it will be the practice. Mistakes will be more quickly admitted, rather than denied then covered up.

    A while back, I was under the misconception that the Linux kernel odd-even unstable-stable scheme applies to minor version numbers (eg 2.4.13) as well as major version numbers. I stated this on Slashdot. Foot in mouth, I was wrong, I can never erase that and anyone can find it on Google. That I'm imperfect is harder to hide than before. Accept it.

  • It's a real issue (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kalifa ( 143176 ) on Thursday July 25, 2002 @06:21AM (#3950210)
    As far as I'm concerned, I've written many things six or seven years ago, especially on discussion forums, which I now find stupid, immature, wrong, and very embarassing.

    I was 23 by then, I am 30 now, and I have changed. Not least when it comes to politics, for example. I would like to be able to ask Google to remove these relics of the past which misrepresent me today, and I can't.

    • You were an adult. It's a public forum. The exercise of free speech has consequences.

      It's not "a real issue" in the sense that your writings should be handled in any other way. I'm disappointed that google is willing to delete records from the only usenet archive at the author's request. This is like the NYT being willing to remove from their archives a published letter to the editor.

  • My university results for certain classes are publicized on a professors page, he has a webpage for each class each year.

    Somehow this page ends up in google and google-cache.
    I guess it's linked from his regular site.
    Is this knowledge that should be known to anyone else on the internet than the people that are into that class? I don't think so. I never asked to put these results on the net in the first place.

    But you see, you can be using nicknames and aliases in your net-existance, but still sensitive information about yourself can get in the public in ways simular to this.

    Note: no, I didn't fail that class.
  • As I read all these rants about privacy and the internet and how everyone knows to keep their information private, I wonder how many of these people are really simply internet newbies.

    And I mean that in the old fashioned /. sense. How many of them were there back when those of us who used the net lived off of .plan, .profile, gopher, archie, veronica, jughead, pine, tin, nn, etc. (and watched or helped many of them emerge).

    In 1993 who would have thought a question posted to alt.personals.bondage would have been stored in a giant database and saved for the world to access almost a decade later? Who would have cared?

    At the time the debate over privacy centered around the existance of anon.penet.fi (and later Dick Depew's incredible failure when he took matters into his own hands).To come out now and say that we should have always been careful is like telling someone they should have had an airbag in their 1930 Buick. The reasons for privacy then were much different and the popular belief was that privacy wasn't needed by the average net user.

    This is one of the issues the internet community has completely flip/flopped around on. Failure to realize that is basicly putting a big blind spot into how this situation has come about. The net went from a trusted space to an untrustworthy space rather quickly, and it's a little late to undo everything we did back then.

    • ANONYMITY on the INTERNET circa 1994 [phreak.org]

      Here are some classic tidbits:

      "Julf's anonymous server seems to me to be contributing to the erosion of civility and responsibility that have been the hallmarks of the more traditional parts of USENET. More than that, Julf has refused to even discuss a compromise to his position that all hierarchies should be open, by default, to his server."

      "There shouldn't be much controversy over this, but there will be anyhow. :-)"

      "Though I disagree with Depews actions, he stood up and took the heat. an8785 engaged in an act of moral cowardice, and is now hiding behind the shield of anonymity. Previously my opinion was that the an8785 should simply be disabled. Given that an8785 has actively urged people to take actions to harm Depew and refused to adequately reverse those actions, I now think an8785 should be unmasked. Should Depew come to actual harm, the anonymous service might find itself in interesting waters."

      "I disagree. an8785 did what s/he felt was necessary, and voicing one's opinions (even anonymously) is the better path than not doing so."

      "In other words, anonymous servers with inadequate safegards protect law-breakers from the consequences of their actions. *That* is what I oppose."

      Read the discussion. Note the use of REAL NAMES in almost every instance. Note the baseline belief differences between the admins of yesteryear and the admins of today. Privacy, as we define it today, was almost unthinkable then. And unless we remember that, blaming the people who behaved in one way a decade ago for not conforming to modern standards is not only a disservice, but a complete denial of how much we have changed.

  • It looks very much like a filler article to me and not something that warrants serious study.

    However, the articel doesn't specifically blame google as the poster claims and seems to have a go at privacy in the age of the web in general. I should perhaps ask here if /. editors actually read the articles that are referenced before posting the pieces?
  • robots.txt

    If you don't want your information on the web, either keep it off, or tell the engines not to index you with meta tags or robots.txt

    You have prosted information with no restrictions so that ANYONE in the world can view it..... what the hell did you expect?
  • I wish that article had been out just a little while longer so I could post a link to the Google cached version of it. I'll have to bide my time, I guess.
  • What's wrong with leaving a trail on the internet? I say that this ability to be remembered or searched is a good thing - it leads to accountability. If you want the world as your audience, you have to be prepared for some of them to remember what you said. This leads to (possibly) better content, since we assume that what they write can be found at a later date.

    Then look at the other side - what if there was a beautiful privacy system online that allowed everybody to hide what they want to hide, yet still have freedom of speech. I would expect many sites to turn into a sort of /. trollfest - even if most people didn't indulge in this sort of activity, those who did would ruin it for the rest. Would you want to be the sane voice of reason amid 400 pr0n links and frist porsts?

    I might be in the minority here - I frequently contact authors of web articles and always leave my real information. I find that when you aren't afraid to introduce yourself, people are much more willing to listen. I just make sure to write as if it's going to be shared with the whole class. I try to keep track of where and when my words find their way to a permanent spot on the web (excluding /. comments which are too numerous) and I even have a section of my upcoming web site devoted to that (yes, that's the url above, yes it's my real name, and I'm not going to answer your third question).

    If you can't stand by what you write, you shouldn't be writing it. If you make a point to always use good grammar, check your spelling, and make sense then you can be proud of what you write. The NYT article looks at the "horror story" angle of posting garbage to the web and having it come back to haunt you when you look for a new job. I say, turn it around and impress the employers with your concise, articulate, sensible, or even humorous opinions.

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