Re: UberVista

Kirk McElhearn (kirk@LENET.FR)
Wed, 13 Mar 1996 18:02:18 +0100

>Seriously: when you've got employers so desperate for any clue about their
>future employees that they're submitting them to hideously invasive
>psychological profile tests and _handwriting analysis_, for godsakes
>(especially in perplexingly nonscientific countries like France), it seems
>like one could make a nice living running an Altavista-like service that
>didn't respect robot barricades. For $10, I'll give you everything your
>candidate has ever posted to the world in any forum; supposedly
>"nonarchived" mailing lists are handled through stealth subscriptions to
>everything in sight via dummy addresses. Not only is this physically
>possible, it's completely legal. And if it becomes illegal, just do it
>from the Caymans.

It makes you realize how much of a public forum we are really in. Unlike
the old-fashioned stump, where words would be spouted without worrying
aboput their lasting, every word that is spewed out here is public, and
may remain so forever.

Neat for posterity, but it makes you think.

Imagine posting something to a news group (like alt.sex.with.minerals),
and not realizing that what you have just said was a joke. (I do it with
calcium) A few years later, when you wife files for divorce, she pulls
out a report from UberVista, and you can't even get to see the kids.

There is something permanent about words; they come out of their own
accord, but once put down on paper, they tend to have an effect of
permanance. Like not inhaling, it will be difficult to admit that "it
was just a joke" ten years later.

UberVista may be useful for some information searching needs, but I think
a whole new vista is opening up of how much privacy we can have, and how
we can keep control of what we say.

Kirk

Kirk McElhearn
Translations from French to English, English to French
Traductions francais-anglais, anglais-francais

kirk@lenet.fr
http://www.lenet.fr/kirk

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