Eventually, everything we do will be on record with Google

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

The generation now in its 20s and 30s is online, and the fact that our thoughts are being recorded forever and kept track of by Google has some worrisome implications for privacy. About the Helaine Olen incident, BattlePanda remarks:

One small chink of comfort: eventually, under the merciless memory of google, we are all bloggers. I mean, even those who do not blog will eventually accumulate a substantial google history. It will be harder to compartmentalize yourself with different sides available to different people. One can only hope that when we reach that point employers would learn to tolerate a little more humanity in their nannies.

Damn right. Even one’s pre-Google history ends up in Google. In 1991 the lowest ranking employees in the state’s university system were fight for better pay and better working conditions. These were the janitors and groundskeepers and bottom-tier maintainence people working for North Carolina’s universities. I was part of a local movement that was trying to bring wider public support to their cause. On November 25, 1991, I presented a petition to the City Council, asking them to offer their support to the struggles of the university employees. Needless to say, in 1991, I did not think to myself, “Some day this will be in Google.” Google didn’t exist till 1996. I did not even get my first email account till 1994.

In this particular case I have no reason for embarassement, as I still believe in the cause that I supported then. But many, many people support causes in their early 20s that they later reconsider in their mid-30s. For all previous human history people have been able to rely on their own obscurity during their youth to walk away from beliefs that they once believed in but no longer do so. From now on, however, the petitions they sign at age 20 will be as easily accessible as the speeches of the President: all will be found with a simple search on Google. We will go through a painful phase over the next ten years as people now in their 20s and 30s will want to move into positions of power and yet will have things they said ten years ago held against them. But in the end we will reach a point when everyone is in the same boat, everyone will have their youthful thoughts as part of the online record. In the end, our personal growth as human beings will have to be accepted as a fact that others have no right to hold against us.