Saved by Google
A couple of days ago my friend Chris Allbritton -- the excellent blogger of Back To Iraq who has been working in Time's Baghdad bureau -- wrote about John Martinkus, an Australian journalist friend of his who was kidnapped then released. Martinkus said that during the interrogation, the captors vanished briefly to check up on the journalist's work; Chris suspected that they Googled him.
Apparently that's precisely what happened, according to Martinkus' employers, SBS. As Australia's National Nine News reports:
"They Googled him, they checked him out on a popular search engine and got onto his own website or his publisher's website and saw he was a writer and journalist," Mr Carey told AAP.
This is a really intriguing moment for the reputation economy. More and more, this is one of Google's central functions: A way to quickly verify someone's reputation. Two years ago, I blogged about what I called the "untouchables" -- people who do not show up on Google at all. And increasingly I find that when I do a search for someone on Google and can't find anything about them -- not a single page -- I'm quite freaked out. It's like running into some "lost man" from a 1960s cold-war spy novel, somebody who has deliberately adopted a new identity and erased all tracks of themselves. Not being visible on Google now seems kind of antisocial: In a digital age, it's simply not polite.
Interestingly, Collision Detection has become a really powerful reputation-management device for me. Almost every time I call a company to interview a CEO, the company's public-relations person immediately googles me, finds this blog, and reads a whole bunch of entries; then they'll mention it to me when we talk, as if to tell me see, I know something about you.
In a recent edition of New York magazine, the staff presented readers with a short guide on "how to disappear". Among the first suggestions?
Begin your new life of anonymity by filing an action with the New York Lower Civil Court to change your name to Michael or Emily—the most common newborn names in the city—and then pick a Googleproof surname like Smith.
(Thanks to Jason Uechi for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at October 21, 2004 12:18 PM
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Hard as this might seem to bloggers, but a large number of people just have no interest in being online. It doesn't even occur to them to google their own name.
The answer is to use pseudonyms for certain kinds of content you don't want employers to see. But truthfully, except for hiring managers and people using dating services, nobody cares. There's just too much crap to wade through.
I once googled a person I dated through an online dating service. She had a lovely website with photos and other things for about 3 years. It didn't bother her that I had found it (and I felt the same way about her looking at my own stuff).
Thinking that her online stuff was ok for dinnertime conversation, I mention some detail/photo about her studying in Moscow in the early 1990's. She looked at me with utter astonishment; "How did you know that?" she said. "It was from an AOL site," I said. "Is that still up?...That was 1997. I cancelled that account long ago."
"It's still up," I said.
"Oh, boy," she said, letting it sink in. "That means you probably saw all the photos of my ex-boyfriend."
Which indeed I had. It was innocuous enough, and I didn't care. But it raises the issue of ISP's leaving old stuff up. I've noticed that former ISP's are pretty lackadaisical about leaving old content up. A female friend had a shrine devoted to her put up to her by her ex-husband. She had gotten divorced, and was embarrassed by it. She had a unique name, and the shrine was the number one search result whenever anyone googled her name. I helped her fix that problem quickly enough, but for two years, she absolutely deplored the fact that her ex still had that damn shrine site up and she could do nothing about it.
Posted by: Robert Nagle at October 28, 2004 4:25 PM
Damn, that's a fascinating story!! What a wonderful metonym of the crazy stuff google is doing to reality.
Posted by: Clive at November 2, 2004 1:33 PM
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Hard as this might seem to bloggers, but a large number of people just have no interest in being online. It doesn't even occur to them to google their own name.
The answer is to use pseudonyms for certain kinds of content you don't want employers to see. But truthfully, except for hiring managers and people using dating services, nobody cares. There's just too much crap to wade through.
I once googled a person I dated through an online dating service. She had a lovely website with photos and other things for about 3 years. It didn't bother her that I had found it (and I felt the same way about her looking at my own stuff).
Thinking that her online stuff was ok for dinnertime conversation, I mention some detail/photo about her studying in Moscow in the early 1990's. She looked at me with utter astonishment; "How did you know that?" she said. "It was from an AOL site," I said. "Is that still up?...That was 1997. I cancelled that account long ago."
"It's still up," I said.
"Oh, boy," she said, letting it sink in. "That means you probably saw all the photos of my ex-boyfriend."
Which indeed I had. It was innocuous enough, and I didn't care. But it raises the issue of ISP's leaving old stuff up. I've noticed that former ISP's are pretty lackadaisical about leaving old content up. A female friend had a shrine devoted to her put up to her by her ex-husband. She had gotten divorced, and was embarrassed by it. She had a unique name, and the shrine was the number one search result whenever anyone googled her name. I helped her fix that problem quickly enough, but for two years, she absolutely deplored the fact that her ex still had that damn shrine site up and she could do nothing about it.
Posted by: Robert Nagle at October 28, 2004 4:25 PM
Damn, that's a fascinating story!! What a wonderful metonym of the crazy stuff google is doing to reality.
Posted by: Clive at November 2, 2004 1:33 PM
Hello folks nice blog youre running
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