54 Wild West 2.0
But many of those same conversations are now conducted online in
a blog or chat room, in full view of the world, automatically indexed
by Google, and broadcast to an audience of millions. Indelicate com-
ments are archived for posterity and presented by Google as if they
were as important as newspapers or government reports.
The permanence of the Internet has hit students and jobseekers
particularly hard. Those classroom notes have become MySpace
posts that are permanently archived in computers around the globe
and that are effectively impossible to delete. Pranks and insults that
might seem funny to teenagers become visible years later to employ-
ers through a simple Google search. Digital photos of the indiscre-
tions of youth are copied around the world and live on long after the
acts themselves have faded from memory.
The permanence of the Internet is often caused by the fact that
digital data can be copied perfectly and nearly instantaneously. An
embarrassing photograph might start on one site, but viewers may
copy it to tens or hundreds of other sites within hours or days.
Even if the original is removed, the copies will live on. The same is
true of any information: the text of a news article or government
report can be copied and pasted from place to place just as easily.
The act of copying one piece of content (an image, a news story,
whatever) across many sites is so common that there is even slang
for it: “copypasta.”
Even in the absence of user intervention, many sites on the In-
ternet automatically archive vast amounts of content. One not-for-
profit project, the Internet Archive, has been creating a permanent
historical record of the entire Internet since 1996.
16
The project cre-
ated a computer program, a “crawler,” that wanders from link to link
across the Internet and saves everything that it sees. So far, it has
saved more than 86 billion web pages. Even when an original web
page is deleted, the copy in the Internet Archive will live on forever.
A smear today can be found tomorrow in the Internet Archive, im-
ages and all. Even the federal government, through the Library of
55The Forces Driving Online Reputation
Congress, is getting into archiving Web content. The Library is
working with the Archive to preserve special collections of Internet
content that the government finds interesting; right now, the gov-
ernment project is limited to a collection of websites as they stood on
September 11, 2001, but other government archives may come in the
future.
17
There are also automatic systems designed to create short-term
archives of Internet content. When Google’s Web spider reviews a
page in order to update its index, it also automatically saves a copy of
the page. This cached copy can be viewed by clicking the “cached”
button that appears under a Google search result. The Google
cache copy is accessible for days (or even weeks) after the original
website has been removed or taken offline, regardless of whether the
original content was false, defamatory, hurtful, or otherwise wrong—
and often the Google cache will stay online even if the original au-
thor wants to remove it.
And there are even shorter-term automatic means of copying In-
ternet content. Many Web browsers allow users to utilize caching
technology that automatically saves a copy of every web page viewed.
For example, there is an “extension” (a helper program) for the Fire-
fox browser that automatically saves a copy of every page a user of
the program views; even if the original page is pulled offline, that
user will be able to view, share, and duplicate his copy of the web
page. Similar technology has even been made social. For example, the
Coral Content Distribution Network (better known as “Coral
cache”) allows users to view the Web through hundreds of distrib-
uted caches (storage systems) around the world. If any user has
viewed a page through the Coral network, then it continues to be
available through the Coral network for some time, even if the orig-
inal website is taken offline (intentionally or accidentally).
Even in the absence of fancy technology, many things on the In-
ternet end up becoming permanent through sheer inertia. Storage is
so cheap these days that it is often easier to simply buy a larger hard
56 Wild West 2.0
drive than to decide whether old data should be kept or deleted.
This leads to countless “zombie sites” that are no longer being main-
tained but that still have content. Often, they are blogs, journals, or
other personal sites; they become zombies when the owner loses in-
terest in the site but never bothers to delete it. Or the user may have
lost the password, passed away, lost access to the Internet, or for-
gotten about the site’s existence entirely. The site lives on, and the
Web host has no incentive to go through the expensive and time-
consuming process of sorting out active and inactive sites when it
costs only pennies to keep the old sites around. All too often, these
zombie sites contain vastly outdated information, and there is often
no way to contact the owner—even if an e-mail address is listed on
the site, it is probably no longer in service. There are vast ghost
towns of inactive sites like these, but Google often has no way to
know which sites are frozen in time and which sites are still actively
maintained.
Of course, not absolutely everything ends up being permanent.
Plenty of things drift away into effective obscurity or complete de-
struction, particularly if they are interesting only to a very small
group of people. But anything that piques the interest of a larger
community can almost never be destroyed. At best, it will fade in
prominence over time, but it will rarely be completely eradicated. In
fact, many naive attempts to get rid of content just make matters
worse. The “Streisand Effect” describes what happens when an at-
tempt to get rid of content causes it to become even more perma-
nent. The facts are simple: Barbra Streisand was unhappy that a
high-resolution photograph of her beachfront home was online, in
part because it showed access points that could be used by intrud-
ers or burglars.
18
However, her attempts to use heavy-handed legal
compulsion to remove the photo from the Internet actually made
the problem worse; the photo was copied to hundreds of sites out
of spite, and now her name is permanently associated with the
photo. Similarly, the Motion Picture Association of America
57The Forces Driving Online Reputation
caused more trouble for itself when it used similar tactics to try to
eliminate an isolated reference to an encryption key that could be
used to copy high-definition DVDs. The Internet backlash against
the MPAA’s heavy-handed tactics was fierce: the code was copied
to more than 200,000 websites and will never be removed from the
Internet.
19
Everything Is Powerful
The power of modern computer technology has been a mixed blessing
for reputation. Thanks to vast databases of digital data, fast networks,
and powerful computers, it is possible for computers to connect once-
separate facts in ways that can be liberating or damaging.
To take one example, millions of people carry cell phones capable
of taking photos and uploading them to the Internet. Users often up-
load their photos to the Internet without identifying the people in the
photos in order to preserve some measure of privacy. But, advance-
ments in digital technology mean that facial recognition is now good
enough that computers can reliably identify individuals in photos after
being “trained” on only a handful of known samples. The result is a
world where countless people—friends and strangers—upload photos
to photo-sharing sites with the best of intentions, but where the
anonymous people in these photos can be quickly identified by com-
puters. The training system for a facial recognition system already ex-
ists thanks to photo “tagging” features of sites like Facebook, Flickr,
and Picasa. Facebook in particular has a massive set of photo tags—
millions of users have each been tagged hundreds of times each.
20
If
the security of Facebook is ever broken, it will be possible to identify
millions of people in previously anonymous photos spread across the
Internet.
There are literally hundreds of millions of photos on the Inter-
net that can become fodder for facial recognition. There are millions
of photos of streets, offices, bars, parties, and other events that in-
58 Wild West 2.0
clude images of people. When combined with facial recognition and
the power of Google to find obscure information, the possibility of
damage to reputation is obvious. Anyone photographed (accidentally
or intentionally) near an adult bookstore could be identified by name
and made subject to ridicule by his peers. Anyone photographed en-
tering a family planning clinic could be located and subjected to pil-
lory by anti-abortion activists. Anyone photographed near a gay bar
is at risk of being named and having his sexual orientation falsely re-
ported or accurately revealed to his employer and peers, especially in
less-tolerant areas of the country. Any attempt to explain away any of
the photos—“I was going to the business next door” or “it isn’t me”—
is likely to be lost in the clutter.
Other Internet applications endanger reputations by aggregating
a vast amount of data that was once scattered across the Internet.
These applications are often “neat” or interesting but create real risks
to reputation. To take just one example, there is a website that at-
tempts to find random personal photos scattered across the Inter-
net.
21
The photos found by the site are often very personal, and many
appear to have never been meant for a public audience. The applica-
tion can find such photos because it searches for the default file-
names used by digital cameras and is thus able to find photos
uploaded to all kinds of personal sites that were never meant to be
revealed to the browsing public as a whole. This site could have al-
ready found photos that you, a friend, a relative, or even an acquain-
tance uploaded—and it could be broadcasting these private photos
to the Internet as a whole right now.
Notes
1. View one such website at TimeCube.com.
2. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our
Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
3. Noam Cohen, “Cyber Ignorance Not Bliss for Public Servants,” New York
Times, June 5, 2007. Go: http://wildwest2.com/go/401
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