There is an interesting article in the NY Times titled "The Web Means the End of Forgetting" which focuses on (a) the internet's ability to retain large amounts of personal data that a person may have made available through social media websites like Facebook and MySpace, blogs, picture sharing sites, and similar services, and (b) the consequences of long-term retention of such information, especially as information about our "different online selves" becomes easier to aggregate and is used, say, for decision-making about job hires, promotions, and other important life activities. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all
The article starts with the example of a yound teacher working towards a teaching degree who was denied the degree because her supervisor discovered a picture of her in a pirate outfit apparently drinking an alcoholic beverage and with the caption "Drunken Pirate". She apparently was "promoting drinking in virtual veiw of her under-age students". She sued but lost. One wonders how often such decisions are made but not revealed to the relevant parties. This raises the question of to what extent do academic department now include internet searches as part of their background examination of students, especially graduate students, and prospective as well as continuing faculty? A couple of other points that are worth highlighting: (1) To forget is to forgive? Quoting from the article: |In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” |the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger 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-Schönberger 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.” (2) "Reputation Scoring" and "Reputation Bankruptcy". Quoting: |... some legal scholars have begun imagining new laws that could allow |people to correct, or escape from, the reputation scores that may govern |our personal and professional interactions in the future. Jonathan Zittrain, |who teaches cyberlaw at Harvard Law School, supports an idea he calls | “reputation bankruptcy,” which would give people a chance to wipe their |reputation slates clean and start over. To illustrate the problem, Zittrain |showed me an iPhone app called Date Check, by Intelius, that offers a |“sleaze detector” to let you investigate people you’re thinking about |dating — it reports their criminal histories, address histories and summaries |of their social-networking profiles. Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, |could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social |desirability based on minute social measurements — like how often he |or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that |would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones |and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more |reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation |brokers — like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and |Equifax, for example — which will provide ratings for people based on |their sociability, trustworthiness and employability. | |To allow people to escape from negative scores generated by these |services, Zittrain says that people should be allowed to declare “reputation |bankruptcy” every 10 years or so, wiping out certain categories of ratings |or sensitive information. His model is the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which |requires consumer-reporting agencies to provide you with one free credit |report a year — so you can dispute negative or inaccurate information — |and prohibits the agencies from retaining negative information about |bankruptcies, late payments or tax liens for more than 10 years. “Like |personal financial bankruptcy, or the way in which a state often seals a |juvenile criminal record and gives a child a ‘fresh start’ as an adult,” |Zittrain writes in his book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop |It,” “we ought to consider how to implement the idea of a second or third |chance into our digital spaces.” (3) We Remember Bad Stuff Better Than Good Stuff. Quoting: |But what happens when people transgress those norms, using Twitter |or tagging photos in ways that cause us serious embarrassment? Can |we imagine a world in which new norms develop that make it easier |for people to forgive and forget one another’s digital sins? | |That kind of social norm may be harder to develop. Alessandro |Acquisti, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, studies the behavioral |economics of privacy — that is, the conscious and unconscious mental |trade-offs we make in deciding whether to reveal or conceal information, |balancing the benefits of sharing with the dangers of disclosure. He is |conducting experiments about the “decay time” and the relative weight |of good and bad information — in other words, whether people discount |positive information about you more quickly and heavily than they |discount negative information about you. His research group’s preliminary |results suggest that if rumors spread about something good you did |10 years ago, like winning a prize, they will be discounted; but if rumors |spread about something bad that you did 10 years ago, like driving drunk, |that information has staying power. Research in behavioral psychology |confirms that people pay more attention to bad rather than good information, |and Acquisti says he fears that “20 years from now, if all of us have a |skeleton on Facebook, people may not discount it because it was an |error in our youth.” A number of intriguing issues of both practical and theoretical importance. -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=3727 or send a blank email to leave-3727-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
