Accountability Online
People blog for a variety of reasons, for many, it offers a chance to be heard, to be discovered, and to network. If you are really good you can even make money along with making an impact. I started blogging for a similar reason, vanity, or better said, posterity. Earlier this year, if you typed my name into Google and performed a search, one of the top results would be an article from the online version of the independent newspaper published in Student Union Room #51 of the University of Akron. It’s a well-written and informative piece from September 2004; unfortunately for me it references a Kenneth Jay Weintraub, a convicted sex offender. Even though it is not me, it’s not what I would like people seeing even associated with my name.
The desire for posterity poses new and interesting challenges, and what you realize is that we have no control over our online data. Take for example the fairly well publicized incident with former Robert Kennedy assistant John Seigenthaler Sr., who found information about himself online; not under a similar name but his own on Wikipedia. The free, editable by anyone encyclopedia offers reference listings on hundreds of thousands of items is something I only wished I had in school. It has entries on so many things it’s hard to believe. It also had an entry on Mr. Seigenthaler. Unfortunately, that information was incorrect. As many have pointed out, that doesn’t mean Wikipedia itself is a bad concept. That it has amassed a following this large and only now had a public incident after four years says a lot. Even so, they do not have the same type of accountability that those writing in print have, where recourse exists for false and misleading entries.
MySpace, the indirect subject of this week’s Business Week represents another example of wholes in accountability. After growing more than 600% this year and being acquired in a highly lucrative, highly covered acquisition, they have just now started to receive a little more scrutiny. Parents now realize that the site, and more importantly the behavior, is not a fad and are paying attention. What they see are kids lying about their age in order to access certain features of the site. And, given that we are in the first iteration of the wired generation, there are actions whose consequences we cannot know until the future arrives. One in particular comes from the information that these young MySpacers post. Many use the site for showing off pictures of parties they attended – images that would seem right at home on the Girls Gone Wild videos.
I can only imagine what parents will think if they see this, and that’s what many of those who post, most likely, don’t realize. The content they post on the sites is there; it’s not going away. When I did a search for myself, I was surprised to find (no, not any pictures) but a comment I had made to an email digest list more than five years ago that was archived online. We already hear of stories of lovers who go their separate ways only for one to find revealing pictures of themselves online because the, now lesser half, chose to breach their confidence. The same will only happen en masse as this current generation of online users grows up. They will find those pictures they posted years later; and, if they don’t, then there is an equally good chance their future partner, future boss, or even their kids might.
Perhaps the most alarming fact about the current state of digital content comes from its permanence. Those of us in marketing try so hard to get listed, but just imagine if the opposite were true. What if you didn’t want to have something available online? Then, what would you do? Only in a few cases have we heard about people successfully having certain information removed. The downside is that you won’t really know or remember what content you produced or someone else produced about you. Nor will you necessarily know who uses it. Thanks to caching technology, even if you modify content on a site, the older version probably still exists somewhere. Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to the lack of accountability. If an underage person on MySpace naively decides to meet someone who then turns out to harm them, should MySpace be to blame? If you had some images up on a site that you took down but later found cached on an engine, should you have the ability for that content to be taken down?
As consumers, we have value. Companies want to reach us and without us companies could not function. The credit system is funny and potentially flawed as it hoards data but provides no insight or recourse for mistakes. Our online, transparent behavior would seem to solve that; yet, in actuality, we have only ended up recreating the same problem. What we produce online is much more visible and open for scrutiny than that being held by the big data companies. But, we are only one step ahead. We can at least see what we have done or is being said but cannot easily rectify it. That makes Google the next Experian in many ways, and that is a scary thought. Perhaps only if, as consumers, we truly own all the data we produce, which includes having the ability to remove it, will this issue be resolved. I don’t know whether I have enough faith in our own accountability for that to come true.
