Valley Chai

there is no shredding in the web (imagine tom hanks yelling at geena davis in “a league of their own“)

i am paranoid about privacy, not that i have tons to hide (well, may be some) but i am extremely touchy about being taken in for a ride. after a recent episode where someone bought a nice Dell Computer on my name, i cleaned up a ton of my traces on the web., some others, however, are so widely distributed, tagged, copied, cached and indexed, it’s impossible to clean it all up.. for example,

• did you know that the comments you make on flickr are indexed forever?
• did you know that if you post a message to a public message board, they are saved and searchable for ever?
• that brings the topic of today to the fore - Facebook is going to start opening up the user info (image, name) to search engines. uh oh. what if some prospective employer searches your name and finds your flippant image. remember tara conner?

we as a collective netizens are slowly but surely getting numb towards steady erosion of privacy. a determined searcher can piece together more about you than you yourself know! so now, i have an alter-ego on the web. and that’s my identity - spandana (which translates to inspiration in telugu).