Official News page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: IS THERE ANY PRIVACY ON THE WEB?

by Hazed

"Imagine that everything you are typing is being read by the person you are applying to for your first job. Imagine that it's all going to be seen by your parents and your grandparents and your grandchildren as well." That's what Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, said recently about systems being put in place by data-tracking companies.

OK, right now maybe they can't track the conversations you have in Fed, or read the emails you send to your friends, but not much of what you do online will remain private if somebody decides to do some digging. Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page on which you have posted details of your life? Once you've put something up there, it is very hard to make it go away again, so those embarrassing photos you put up as a teenager of you falling down drunk or dressing up in peculiar clothes are going to come back to haunt you. What will potential bosses think of you when they look you up?

Even worse, if you ever find yourself newsworthy for any reason, you can expect journalists to start dredging up every single fact about you they can find on the internet. One of the parties involved in the recent Spitzer scandal found that out to her cost. Read about her plight here.

You can deal with this lack of privacy in one of two ways. You can be ever so careful about what you post on the net, trying to avoid putting up anything that might turn round and bite you up. Or you can say "to hell with it" and post what you like, secure in the knowledge that anybody who tries to use the material against you probably has embarrassing stuff of their own out there you can retaliate with.

One thing you can't do, though, is just ignore the issue, because it is only going to get worse.

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