Google never forgets
A cautionary tale
BY Max Fawcett
Illustration by David Anderson
We all have one, be it a mother, a well-meaning grandparent or a particularly mischievous college buddy. They’re the people who insist on sharing embarrassing stories—which are invariably supported either by a gallery of photographs or a library of shaky home videos, with those you had foolishly hoped would never see them. For example, my mother enjoys producing the front page of the Vancouver Sun, circa 1981, on which I am pictured stark naked and sucking on my bottle while sitting on the edge of a public swimming pool on a particularly hot summer day. The upside was the fact that, like my naked baby picture, these embarrassing moments could be managed, the mortifying game of show-and-tell limited to small audiences, and its effects mitigated with healthy doses of self-deprecating laughter.
The internet, quite unintentionally, has changed that. Thanks to what amounts to a universally accessible photographic memory, the internet essentially creates the digital equivalent of an unauthorized biography for everyone who leaves a digital footprint. This biography is full of things you might like to share and others you might not, from your comments in an online discussion group to your Grade 12 graduation pictures or some ill-conceived poetry you submitted to an online journal a few years ago. Worse still is the fact that you have almost no control over the biography’s content.
Douglas Coupland describes this as our digital “shadow,” and he believes it has dangerous implications. As he told a Time reporter last spring:
You’ve got this thing that follows you no matter where you go. It’s going to survive your real shadow long after you’re dead. It’s composed of truth, half-truth, lies, vengeance, wishful thinking, accuracy, inaccuracy. It grows and grows and gets bigger. It’s you but it’s not you.
It is, in other words, like having the details of a particularly nasty high-school rumour tattoed on your forehead for the rest of your life. Worse still to Coupland is the fact that these shadows are no longer limited merely to the famous and assorted minor celebrities: “Mine’s pretty large at the moment but I think in a few years, everyone’s is going to be huge. It won’t be just people in the public light any more,” he said in the same interview.
The ghost writer behind these increasingly common unauthorized biographies is none other than Google, that most trusted and financially successful search engine. Google, you see, has betrayed your trust. While it was guiding you to a particularly good restaurant or helping you find a long-lost high-school friend, it was also collecting the dirt on you and sharing it with anyone who would listen.
The search engine business used to be a competitive one, with rival engines like Lycos, HotBot and AltaVista battling Google for market domination. But Google’s code won out, in large part because it was so good at finding a good bed and breakfast in Napa Valley instead of napalm manufacturers or articles on the dangers of breakfast in bed when you punched “bed and breakfast + Napa” into the search field. But that superior code is also ruthlessly efficient at finding every reference, however obscure, tangential or dated it might be, when an individual’s name is searched. As the National Post’s Samantha Grice wrote in March, “the internet’s helpful librarian can become an embarrassing mom who insists on hanging your dorkiest kid photos above the mantle and incessantly gushing about your less-than-stellar achievements.”
I learned this lesson first hand, thanks to an Angelfire/Geocities website that I created in 1998. I was 18 years old, living in a student residence at UBC and, like many people at the time, relatively unfamiliar with the internet. One of my floor-mates, a computer science student, appealed to my vanity—a winning strategy to this day, unfortunately—by suggesting that I create a webpage. After all, he argued, what was the harm? It was free, and if I either got bored with it or didn’t like what I had created I could just delete it and forget about the whole experience. He neglected to mention that I could also forget that it existed.
In 2004, I finally remembered. Vanity being one of my chief weaknesses, I was Googling myself—a process in which you enter your own name as a search term on Google and discover your digital reflection—and I discovered, with no small degree of horror, the webpage that I had forgotten. Appropriately titled—appropriate in that it exacted the greatest amount of embarrassment—“Max Fawcett, this is your life,” the page was a quintessentially amateurish presentation of my interests at age 18.
According to the site, “I’m an honors history student/freelance newspaper writer. On this page you will find my collection of wrestling, southpark, and other cool links.” Surf through and you could—and according to the ticker positioned at the bottom of the page, 670 people did—find a “shrine” to “the greatest wrestler of all-time, Chris Jericho” as well as “an extensive collection of South Park links, images, and episodes.” The cherry in this cocktail of shame is the email address provided, greekgod@angelfire.com, a reference both to the summer I had spent in Greece and the fact that, I assume, I was fairly high on myself at the time of the page’s construction._The cost of my “bad Google” has been limited to embarrassment, but for others the price of leaving a digital footprint can be much higher. Employers now routinely Google prospective hires, and one ill-considered comment on a weblog five years ago can mean the difference between making the final round of interviews and being passed over in favour of someone without an objectionable Google shadow. A recent Harris Interactive poll found that 23 percent of adult internet users in the United States had searched online for information about their clients, customers, workers and potential employees.
Worse still is the fact that these Google-happy bosses often find what they’re looking for. Nunavut Tourism employee Penny Cholmondeley—Polar Penny, to her online visitors—stumbled across this unfortunate reality on July 18, 2004, when she was terminated from her job for comments made on her weblog. Intended as a personal journal that would detail her summer in Canada’s Arctic for her friends and family, the blog included the occasional unflattering picture of, or critical observation on Iqaluit. Without notice or an opportunity to defend herself, Cholmondeley was fired by Nunavut Tourism after it was tipped off about the existence of the blog by an anonymous source just before the end of her six-month probation period. Polar Penny’s experience isn’t unique, either. Ironically enough, the next year Google employee Mark Jen was fired after blogging about his first few days at work. Delta Air Lines employee Ellen Simonetti was fired because the airline discovered photos of her in her uniform that she had posted on a website.
Perhaps the most infamous Google shadow in history belongs to Mike Klander, once a powerful organizer for former prime minister Paul Martin and the author of an ill-considered blog posting in which he compared federal NDP candidate Olivia Chow to a certain breed of dog. The post and blog were quickly taken down, but not before Google’s robots—the architects of everyone’s Google shadow—captured and archived it. Klander resigned, but the blog became a major news story and gravely harmed Klander’s boss, then Trinity-Spadina Liberal MP Tony Ianno, who was trying to defeat Chow for a third consecutive time to retain his seat. I’m not sure what Mr. Klander is like as a person, but this seems like an awfully high price to pay for what amounts to a bad joke.
The lesson here—ironically, one I’m not heeding, as the publication of this piece will breathe new life into that darkest corner of my Google shadow—is to be careful of what you put on display. The internet, for all of its marvelous technological advances and still greater possibilities, is a more dangerous place than we’d like to admit, and that danger comes not from spam, viruses, worms or even those creepy old men who prowl chat rooms pretending to be 16-year-old girls, but instead from the fact that our every cyber- step, every cyber-thought and every search term is saved, sealed and put on display, without our consent and beyond our control. Consider yourself warned.
