Following is a rather lengthy news article which some of you here will find
interesting. It will help you to better understand why, for many years now,
I have encouraged, and in fact admonished all of my Christian friends, to be
very careful regarding what you say and do online, what hyperlinks you click
on, how much personal information you reveal concerning yourself, etc. The
bottom line, as I have explained so many times before, is that once personal
information is "in the cloud" -- that is, stored on web servers, it is very
difficult -- if not impossible -- to erase; and that information -- good or
bad -- may follow you for the rest of your life.


The Web Means the End of Forgetting

By JEFFREY ROSEN - NYT

July 19, 2010

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at
Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her
MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking
from a plastic cup, with the caption "Drunken Pirate." After
discovering the
page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was
"unprofessional," and the dean of Millersville University School of
Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in
virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder's
scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree. Snyder
sued, arguing that the university had violated her First Amendment rights by
penalizing her for her (perfectly legal) after-hours behavior. But in 2008,
a federal district judge rejected the claim, saying that because Snyder was
a public employee whose photo didn't relate to matters of public concern,
her "Drunken Pirate" post was not protected speech.

When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital
age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one
example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions
of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the
Internet records everything and forgets nothing -- where every online photo,
status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored
forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares
embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos
and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the
fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British
girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook, "I'm so
totally bored!!"; there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist who
tried to enter the United States but was turned away at the border -- and
barred permanently from visiting the country -- after a border guard's
Internet search found that the therapist had written an article in a
philosophy journal describing his experiments 30 years ago with L.S.D.

According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and
human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do
online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when
scrutinizing applicants -- including search engines, social-networking
sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter
and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they
have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos
and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.

Technological advances, of course, have often presented new threats to
privacy. In 1890, in perhaps the most famous article on privacy ever
written, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis complained that because of new
technology -- like the Kodak camera and the tabloid press -- "gossip is no
longer the resource of the idle and of the vicious but has become a trade."
But the mild society gossip of the Gilded Age pales before the volume of
revelations contained in the photos, video and chatter on social-media sites
and elsewhere across the Internet. Facebook, which surpassed MySpace in 2008
as the largest social-networking site, now has nearly 500 million members,
or 22 percent of all Internet users, who spend more than 500 billion minutes
a month on the site. Facebook users share more than 25 billion pieces of
content each month (including news stories, blog posts and photos), and the
average user creates 70 pieces of content a month. There are more than 100
million registered Twitter users, and the Library of Congress recently
announced that it will be acquiring -- and permanently storing -- the entire
archive of public Twitter posts since 2006.

In Brandeis's day -- and until recently, in ours -- you had to be a
celebrity to be gossiped about in public: today all of us are learning to
expect the scrutiny that used to be reserved for the famous and the
infamous. A 26-year-old Manhattan woman told The New York Times that she was
afraid of being tagged in online photos because it might reveal that she
wears only two outfits when out on the town -- a Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt or a
basic black dress. "You have movie-star issues," she said,
"and you're just
a person."

We've known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism,
exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to
understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what
others say about us, goes into our permanent -- and public -- digital files.
The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an
almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve
the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our
checkered pasts.

In a recent book, "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital
Age," the
cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger cites Stacy Snyder's case as a
reminder of the importance of "societal forgetting." By
"erasing external
memories," he says in the book, "our society accepts that human beings
evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences
and adjust our behavior." In traditional societies, where missteps are
observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure
that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schoenberger
notes, a society in which everything is recorded "will forever tether us to
all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them." He
concludes that "without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a
difficult undertaking."

It's often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second
chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory
bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances -- no
opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst
thing you've done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

THE CRISIS -- AND THE SOLUTION?

All this has created something of a collective identity crisis. For most of
human history, the idea of reinventing yourself or freely shaping your
identity -- of presenting different selves in different contexts (at home,
at work, at play) -- was hard to fathom, because people's identities were
fixed by their roles in a rigid social hierarchy. With little geographic or
social mobility, you were defined not as an individual but by your village,
your class, your job or your guild. But that started to change in the late
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with a growing individualism that came to
redefine human identity. As people perceived themselves increasingly as
individuals, their status became a function not of inherited categories but
of their own efforts and achievements. This new conception of malleable and
fluid identity found its fullest and purest expression in the American ideal
of the self-made man, a term popularized by Henry Clay in 1832. From the
late 18th to the early 20th century, millions of Europeans moved from the
Old World to the New World and then continued to move westward across
America, a development that led to what the historian Frederick Jackson
Turner called "the significance of the frontier," in which the possibility
of constant migration from civilization to the wilderness made Americans
distrustful of hierarchy and committed to inventing and reinventing
themselves.

In the 20th century, however, the ideal of the self-made man came under
siege. The end of the Western frontier led to worries that Americans could
no longer seek a fresh start and leave their past behind, a kind of
reinvention associated with the phrase "G.T.T.," or "Gone to
Texas." But the
dawning of the Internet age promised to resurrect the ideal of what the
psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called the "protean self." If you
couldn't flee to Texas, you could always seek out a new chat room and create
a new screen name. For some technology enthusiasts, the Web was supposed to
be the second flowering of the open frontier, and the ability to segment our
identities with an endless supply of pseudonyms, avatars and categories of
friendship was supposed to let people present different sides of their
personalities in different contexts. What seemed within our grasp was a
power that only Proteus possessed: namely, perfect control over our shifting
identities.

But the hope that we could carefully control how others view us in different
contexts has proved to be another myth. As social-networking sites expanded,
it was no longer quite so easy to have segmented identities: now that so
many people use a single platform to post constant status updates and photos
about their private and public activities, the idea of a home self, a work
self, a family self and a high-school-friends self has become increasingly
untenable. In fact, the attempt to maintain different selves often arouses
suspicion. Moreover, far from giving us a new sense of control over the face
we present to the world, the Internet is shackling us to everything that we
have ever said, or that anyone has said about us, making the possibility of
digital self-reinvention seem like an ideal from a distant era.

Concern about these developments has intensified this year, as Facebook took
steps to make the digital profiles of its users generally more public than
private. Last December, the company announced that parts of user profiles
that had previously been private -- including every user's friends,
relationship status and family relations -- would become public and
accessible to other users. Then in April, Facebook introduced an interactive
system called Open Graph that can share your profile information and friends
with the Facebook partner sites you visit.

What followed was an avalanche of criticism from users, privacy regulators
and advocates around the world. Four Democratic senators -- Charles Schumer
of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Mark Begich of Alaska and Al
Franken of Minnesota -- wrote to the chief executive of Facebook, Mark
Zuckerberg, expressing concern about the "instant personalization" feature
and the new privacy settings. The reaction to Facebook's changes was such
that when four N.Y.U. students announced plans in April to build a free
social-networking site called Diaspora, which wouldn't compel users to
compromise their privacy, they raised more than $20,000 from more than 700
backers in a matter of weeks. In May, Facebook responded to all the
criticism by introducing a new set of privacy controls that the company said
would make it easier for users to understand what kind of information they
were sharing in various contexts.



Jeff Snyder, SysOp - Armageddon BBS  Visit us at endtimeprophecy.org port 23
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