Internet Truths

Should you believe everything you see on TV? Absolutely not.

Should you believe everything you read in a newspaper? Absolutely not.

Should you believe everything that a friend tells you? Absolutely not.

Should you believe everything you read on the Internet? Absolutely not. But who's job is it to fix it?

And more importantly, can you? It's important to make sure that you remember that once it's been posted on the Internet, it's there for life. I ran across an interesting article the other day entitled Teaching Computers How to Forget... and Why it Matters. It talked about the need to define an expiration date for files and information. There are a number of reasons cited, but two of them were to help us deal with information overload, and second to protect us from the errors of our youth.

The information overload seems like a good idea...almost. The proposition is that as you save a file, or send an email, etc, you'd be prompted as to the life you want to assign to the file. A quick email to friends about lunch plans should life not longer than 1 day for instance. A Turbo Tax return backup file should live long enough to protect you in an audit, but then it becomes a liability. A picture of your youngest making a silly face should last long enough for you to show it to their potential dates in the future.

Protection from our youthful foibles... is there really any protection from that? It was raised that posts on Facebook, blogs, etc might come back to haunt you when you switch jobs in the future. You're foolin' yourself if you think that employers are not Googling your name, checking Facebook, MySpace, Blog Search, etc before hiring (or even interviewing) new hires. [That's one reason you won't find too much controversy on this blog. My current employer has already stated that they're trolling for associated employee sites.]

All that being said, is attempting to apply an expiration date really the solution to either of these? I don't know, but to me that seems like the initial overhead would be too cumbersome. And if you're emailing, or posting, or saving something that could be dangerous or even just a nuisance by making searches take a little longer, are you really in the right mind to set some arbitrary death date for that information? Probably not.

I don't have the solution, so I just try to be a little bit more careful about what I post, email, save, or where I visit. I'd rather not have to worry about what it might cause in the future.