It is now 2012, nearly 6 years after I created this little blog (which has been dormant since then), and a lot has happened -- but some things remain the same: for instance, I'm still grappling with internet privacy issues, still attending grad school in library science, and still seeking ways to communicate meaningfully online with others without wasting too much of the reader's time (or my own).
Some housecleaning:
Of the two links I provided in 2007, Nicolas Morin is still actively blogging (and now provides helpful English summaries of his posts. Thank you Mr Morin!) -- but MoBuzz has gone bankrupt and disappeared. Some sort of German hipster search engine has replaced it at that web address, but I'm not convinced they're really the same thing. So I think I will pull that link until I can locate the actual MoBuzz vlog episodes. In the meantime, you can find some of them on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mobuzz?blend=2&ob=0
"The internet is forever", they say, but huge chunks of it seem to have a startlingly brief lifespan.
3 comments:
I am concerned about these holes in our collective memory as well. Some are due to issues like bankruptcy; some because the owner no longer wants the information out there.
There is a debate in Europe about the "right to forget" -- the one creating/posting the information has a right to withdraw it. Have you been following that? Another related issue is "the right to be forgotten"--someone else has posted information about you that you'd like withdrawn. Both sides of the same coin--forgetting and remembering--present benefits and risks.
Hi Prof Franks -- thanks for mentioning the "right to remember" and the "right to be forgotten" -- since I've been busy with school, I haven't had an opportunity to spend as much time pursuing my privacy studies (except of course when they land on my doorstep by themselves, as did Google's new privacy policy a few days ago). Also, privacy as a topic has grown exponentially so that I can't keep up as easily as I could a few years ago when it was just the occasional story every few months or so. Still, I'm very interested in the topic, and I think that the debate in Europe is a very interesting one.
It's the ultimate conundrum of privacy, isn't it: we all want everyone else to be transparent, so that we can root out potential problems before they spiral out of control, but we don't want others to be able to see us transparently, so that we don't expose ourselves to potential problems either.
So how do we reconcile these contradictory impulses?
Any answer to that question isn't really an "answer" unless it satisfies in both directions. Hmmmm....
You've said it very well. How do we satisfy everyone? I haven't had time to delve as deeply into privacy issues as I'd like either. But some of the issues do affect us personally or on the job, so it is difficult to ignore.
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