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omg! — Information Overload

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Agree to Disagree

Back in the good ol’ days (circa Y2K), e-privacy was just a right-click away. Digital detritus evaporated in the Trash Can, and troublesome instant messages vanished with a quick stroke of Ctrl + Q (in the orotund AOL voice: Goodbye!). But nowadays, the World Wide Web casts a world wide net, and your computer’s contents are only as private as some tech guy in the Ag Quad’s Computing and Communications Center sees fit.

And Big Brother’s not just keeping track, he’s also keeping notes. That’s why Congressman Mark Foley — or maf54, for those of you who frequent the D.C.-area chatrooms — couldn’t do much in the face of allegations that he sent lewd messages to pages. You can’t get on TV and say, “I did not have sex with that page!” when the Senate database prints out choice comments like, “do I make you horny?”

It’s not just pedophiles and Senate pages who are being monitored. When America Online released anonymous search histories for thousands of users, it didn’t take The New York Times long to reveal No. 4417749 as 62-year-old widow, Thelma Arnold. The Times tracked down Arnold through searches such as “landscapers in Lilburn, Ga,” though along the way, the reporter found out that she was also seeking aged “60 single men” and remedies for a “dog that urinates on everything.”

For high school and college students, digital surveillance has produced immediate consequences, though some argue that the real online fallout won’t happen for another five or ten years.

At present, online monitoring has revealed everything from the embarrassing to the punishable. At the New York City private school Horace Mann, at least one student was asked to withdraw from the school this month after a teacher uncovered a Facebook group hostile to the Women’s Issues Club.

College students are under digital scrutiny as well. At Fisher College in Boston last year, a student was expelled after criticizing a security officer on Facebook, and students at North Carolina State were written up for posting photos of underage drinking, according to The Times.

In some cases, though, it’s the online users who are reaping the digital revolution’s benefits. When my little sister’s English class wanted dirt on their teacher at Scarsdale Middle School, they Googled her name, and voila! — topless photos from a jujitsu-themed pornography website. The teacher was axed (or karate chopped, if you will) a few months later.

Likewise, when Kyle Stoneman, a George Washington University student, wanted to get back at the police for monitoring his Facebook events, he sent out an invite for a beer blast. When the cops arrived to break up the drinking party, they found only cakes and cookies decorated with the word “beer.” The victorious Stoneman posted photos of the befuddled policemen on Facebook.

Students applying for summer internships have already been cautioned to take embarrassing content off of their Facebook or MySpace profiles, but what will happen in ten years, when we’re being vetted for elections, checked out by employers or scrutinized by potential spouses? As one student wrote in the Yale Daily News, “Facebook profiles will not lose their ability to embarrass 20 years down the road.” I’m not planning on running for office, but a few future Presidents of the United States are, and unluckily for them, we’re all likely registered Facebook users.

When W. ran for re-election in ’04, CBS News produced documents claiming that the President had avoided military service during the Vietnam War. The papers turned out to be forged, but imagine what partisan hacks (and hackers) could do with scores of old college photographs, e-mails and even wall posts or Facebook messages.

So what’s to be done?

In one scenario, websites greatly increase privacy controls, so that users can keep out unwanted intruders. The student uproar after Facebook introduced its News Feed and Mini-Feed suggests that despite demands for more and faster content, online users do indeed desire a degree of anonymity. On Facebook, it’s fine to stalk others, but not fine to know who’s stalking you. And despite vast technological advances, few college students have embraced video chat capabilities with the same fervor as they have instant messaging.

Mark Zuckerberg apologized for Facebook’s new features and introduced privacy controls to mollify the e-community, but will the government and the press show the same restraint? More and more, the public’s “right to know” has justified unearthing secrets and impeaching characters (or Presidents).

Websites have always claimed to be strict on security, but in many cases, they have sold out to corporate interests or simply been hacked. Those who believe Facebook’s privacy filters or Cornell’s e-mail security provisions to be absolutely secure are naïve; just check out http://grownupgeek.com/hack-facebook, where they’ve “put together a collection of ways to hack and modify Facebook.” Or talk to Jackson Chu ’04, who “found that words in his e-mail started to delete themselves,” after a hacker accessed his account, according to the Oct. 16, 2002 issue of The Sun.

Another possibility is that with everyone having dirt on everyone else, there will be a general lowering of standards in vetting processes. As Kyle Stoneman, the cake party student at George Washington said, “The way I look at it is that in the future with the growing nature of information transparency, having embarrassing pictures out there will be the norm.”

In many ways, the perks and problems associated with digital information are similar to those of nuclear power, which, unlike coal or oil, produces no immediate byproduct. The small amounts of high-level radioactive waste it does emit are buried in underground sites across the country, with the expectation that in some hundred years, we’ll figure out what to do. Our digital byproducts — photos, e-mails, IMs and videos — have a much shorter half-life, and in this case, Chernobyl might be right around the corner. g2g, ttyl.

Rob Fishman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbf25@cornell.edu Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.

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