I have a blot on my past. And the problem is that you can easily find it via one of those nasty search engines. All you need to do is enter my name, press enter, and after skipping through a couple of pages you will see that I once made my living by, well, writing about German folk music.
In my defence, I was young and needed the money. And when I applied for this job at a music magazine, I was thinking of backstage parties, meeting rockstars and free concert tickets. Instead I ended up writing reviews of the latest DVDs of several folk singers. Being a music journalist does not necessarily add anything to your coolness factor.
But while I can still play the “I needed to pay my tuition fees” card if it gets to my past jobs, there are things that are harder to excuse – or simply not meant for some people like your boss or colleagues. The New York Times recently reported the case of a young woman, who lost her job as a teacher in training because of a picture on Facebook which showed her wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup captioned “drunken pirate”. The university felt this photo would promote drinking to her under-age students and denied the student her teaching degree.
Although this is an extreme example, more and more companies start to investigate candidates for a job via search engines, social networks and other websites before even inviting them for an interview. Even if you work through all the privacy settings in your profile, some search engines will still pick up the information you thought was private. So how can you protect your privacy online?
In 2009, computer scientists from the University of Washington first tried to teach the internet to forget things. They developed a system called Vanish, which aims to protect our privacy by giving the data an “expiration date” after which the file information is no longer accessible, even for the person who owns the data. This works by encrypting the information using an encryption key that not even the author of the data knows. To read the information, you need to retrieve the decryption key first, which is broken up into smaller parts and saved via a specific distribution on several servers. After the expiration date, the components from the decryption key are deleted which makes it impossible to decrypt the data.
Shortly after the authors published this system, a team of researchers from the Universities of Michigan, Austin (Texas) and Princeton discovered that the servers with the decryption codes could easily be hacked and therefore did not provide the protection it promoted. The developers of Vanish soon used these findings to improve their system, but it is still not believed to provide 100 per cent protection.
A similar approach was undertaken by German computer scientist Michael Backes, who recently presented his software X-pire, which was also promoted by the German Ministry for Consumer Care. It also uses an expiration date for the data, but instead of storing the key for accessing it on different server, this information is all stored in the same special server. Maintaining this server is expensive and so one month of using X-pire will cost you about €10, and if you want to look at pictures uploaded with this software, you need to install another, free, piece of software. The fact that all the data is stored in one place raises concerns from several experts, who fear that this “single point of failure” would make the system vulnerable to cyber attacks.
So is there a way to make the internet forget about the embarrassing party pictures from last summer or your comments on how much you hate your job? Not yet. If you want some privacy, you would be better to try and keep private things private – and away from the web.
Picture © Matthew Bowden
Other Elements articles in which you might be interested:
What people are saying