Lashon ha-Ra in the Internet Age
Every since people have been talking they have also been gossiping and slandering. Lashon ha-Ra is one of the great weaknesses of most people on Earth and the internet has possibly made it even worse. Daniel J. Solove has tried to tackle the difficult question of privacy, slander and reputation in the internet age in his new book, The Future of Reputation. From the dustjacket,
What information about you is available on the Internet?
What if it’s wrong, humiliating, or true but regrettable?
Will it ever go away?
Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there’s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look.
Something which has been spoken about lately is that Google keeps a record of people’s searches and their IP addresses. They have recently changed their policy regarding “server logs”. It is not only Google, but the entire electronic/digital world which we live in. Almost everything that we buy and many things that we do are stored and analyzed. If you have some free time see the chilling documentary at Googlonymous. One of the areas which Prof. Solove discusses is blogs, and hopefully this blog has kept reputations intact and my keyboard has distanced itself from gossip.
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Thanks for this post, Michael. I build on it in a post of my own.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:33 am
[...] have written before about the problem of privacy in the Internet Age, and things are just getting worse. Over at the [...]