Anyway

Dar­ren Bare­foot has some inter­est­ing thoughts about pri­vacy in the inter­net age and the way in which today’s north amer­ic­an teen­agers are grow­ing up post­ing everything about their lives on the inter­net. Up till now, most of the dis­cus­sion I’ve read on the sub­ject has revolved around the effects on future careers of post­ing poten­tially embar­rass­ing stuff on the web. Derek Miller points out that bosses will also have embar­rass­ing stuff up on the web, although there will still be a gen­er­a­tion gap there for some years until those future bosses become bosses (assum­ing that most bosses will still con­tin­ue to be older than many of the people they employ).

We’re start­ing to dis­cern the out­lines of some likely effects of this now. For example, if I get an inter­est­ing email from someone I haven’t heard of, I’ll look them up in Google or Yahoo search, or Linked­In. I don’t neces­sar­ily ignore the email if I don’t find any inform­a­tion about the per­son, but I can see that hap­pen­ing in the future — if you don’t exist in search engines, is that going to be con­sidered weird?

Find­ing people I’ve lost touch with is get­ting easi­er every year, as long as they haven’t changed their name. I’ve man­aged to track down old friends, and oth­ers (who did change their name after mar­riage) have man­aged to track me down. Mind you, I’m rel­at­ively easy to find. 

One effect I’m won­der­ing about is on politi­cians: cur­rently politi­cians either have to be squeaky clean, or good at hid­ing things the elect­or­ate might not like to hear about. Rudy Giuliani’s per­son­al life includes three mar­riages and gay friends, all well-doc­u­mented; in pre­vi­ous years this would have made a pres­id­en­tial cam­paign basic­ally impossible. Now it just makes it more dif­fi­cult, or maybe it’s just dis­cussed more; in future years when more inform­a­tion is avail­able about every­one on the inter­net, and hid­ing these things is going to be impossible, will voters be more accepting?

One inter­est­ing aspect to this is how little inform­a­tion is avail­able about Google’s founders — and more than a little iron­ic, giv­en how easy they’ve made it to find inform­a­tion about oth­er people. An art­icle on Moth­er Jones, via Bruce Schnei­er, has more.