Thursday - Apr 7, 2011
William Cronon is a respected author, president-elect of the American Historical Association, and a distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also under attack by the Wisconsin Republican Party, which has filed a Freedom of Information request to see all of Professor Cronon’s email that contain any of these twenty keywords: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.
Why is he under attack? You can probably guess from the above terms.
Professor Cronon writes a personal blog, “Scholar as Citizen.” A few weeks ago he wrote a post about a conservative organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which drafts and circulates proposed legislation to Republican legislators. Cronon alleged that ALEC played a role in the union-busting legislation championed by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The post went viral, garnering over 500,000 hits in two days. And two days after Cronon’s post, the Wisconsin Republican Party filed its request with the university.
Professor Cronon and many others have charged that this is a shameless attempt to intimidate him and stifle academic freedom. He claims that the Wisconsin GOP wants to discredit him by showing that he misused state email resources.
Regardless of the motive, my takeaway from this story is that you should always keep your professional and personal correspondence separate. The first rule of email is to have two accounts. (By the way, there’s no indication that Professor Cronon did anything wrong.)
Your business email may be subject to discovery pending on the laws in your state or country. Gaining access to your private Gmail or Yahoo! account, for instance, is a whole other matter. While it may be faster to just dash off a quick note to a friend from your business account, resist the urge. You never know how it may come back to bite you.
Wednesday - Mar 16, 2011
For centuries, humankind has searched for a way to live forever. To my knowledge, only vampires have discovered the secret to eternal life–until now. As more of our lives are lived online, we’ve created a type of digital immortality on the Internet.
Have your searched for yourself on Google lately? Are you surprised by what turns up?
If you’re like most people, there’s a trove of personal information about you–educational background, employment history, relationships with friends and family, photos, videos and a whole lot more. As I wrote recently, college admissions officers and employers search the Web to find out about you. There can be a price to pay for unflattering material about you.
What if you’re unhappy with what you uncover? Can it be erased? The answer is yes, but it’s not easy.
If you have a website, you can always edit or delete biographical information. The problem is that search engines like Google cache the data. Even if you remove it, it can still be found and accessed from Google’s servers.
To complicate the problem, someone may have copied the material and posted it on another site or emailed it to a third party. The bottom line is that once the genie is out of the bottle, you may be out of luck.
Still, if you’re concerned about your reputation or privacy, it’s worth a try.
If the offending material is on your Facebook page, it’s easy enough to remove it yourself. But if it’s on someone else’s page, you will have to contact the person or organization and ask them politely to modify or remove the content.
You may find that you appear in a photo taken without your knowledge. Maybe you were an innocent bystander at a beer blast. An alternative to removing the image is to have your name removed from the caption or tag. At least it will make it harder to find you!
If the offending content is on a website or blog, try contacting the site owner or administrator. Many sites sport a “Contact Us” page with an email link. If you can’t find one, use the Whois database to look up the contact information for the site admin. Email your request along with a credible explanation of why the content should be removed.
Even if you manage to get the content successfully deleted, there’s that pesky cache to contend with. Try Google’s removal request tool. It’s an online form you can submit to Google requesting the removal of content that violates Google’s criteria.
Going forward, monitor what’s being said about you online by setting up Google Alerts. When your name or any any other topic you request are indexed by Google, you’ll receive an email, along with a link to the content.
Finally, don’t become your own worst enemy. Think before you post online or face the consequences, as this student from UCLA found out the hard way.
Wednesday - Dec 8, 2010
Being online is a curious experience. On one hand, it feels totally anonymous, just you and your computer, an obedient object that responds to your every command. On the other hand, almost all your online activity is recorded–every website you visit, every link you click and a whole lot more. For details about how this works, read “Controlling Your Clickstream.”
I’ve blogged about online privacy and how technology is rapidly eroding that increasingly quaint concept. Now the Federal Trade Commission is getting into the act.
Just as Americans can sign up for a Do Not Call list that prevents telemarketers from making pesky dinnertime phone calls, the FTC is proposing Do Not Track, a way to prevent online marketers from collecting personal data about you.
Needless to say, the proposal is controversial. Internet companies claim that this will stymie ecommerce by preventing them from tailoring ads targeted to your interests. There is some logic to this argument. If you’re a guy, you’re probably not interested in seeing ads for women’s fashion accessories. If advertising is the price to be paid for free online content, then the ads should at least be relevant. Fair enough.
But do you really want all of your online activity recorded, sliced, diced, sold and used as a weapon to get you to buy more stuff? I know I don’t.
The other day I was browsing online for a file cabinet. I visited a few sites like Office Depot, Target, Ikea, and Overstock, checking out the options. Then I went to Hotmail. Alongside my e-mail was a banner ad for a file cabinet. It was creepy. I felt like someone was spying on me. I suppose someone was and I didn’t like it. Nor do the 80% of Americans that told Consumer Watchdog they want laws to protect their online privacy.
At this point it’s not clear how Do Not Track would work. One solution is to have a feature built into your web browser–a button or setting–that would block data from being collected and transmitted to third parties, much the way you can now prevent cookies from being stored on your computer.
Yesterday Microsoft announced that it would build a Do Not Track option into Internet Explorer 9. The browser is currently in beta release. (If you’re curious how this will work, read about it here.) It’s a good start.
But what’s really needed is a broad policy that spells out how the personal information collected on every American can be used. Right now it’s a free-for-all, with no clear guidelines. While we may be able to stop personal information from being collected in the future, what about everything that’s already out there? What protection do we have? Very little at the moment.
According to Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, “There are no limits to what types of information can be collected, how long it can be retained, with whom it can be shared and how it can be used. Consumers simply have no legal control over being spied on when they go online.”
Although more action is needed, the FTC is taking a baby step in the right direction. If you’re motivated, the commission is accepting comments from the public until January 21, 2011.
Do you feel like prey being tracked across the online consumer landscape? Share your thoughts on this important issue.
