Life in a Googlefish bowl

What are the long-term implications of a search engine as powerful as Google? For one thing, people can find out an awful lot about you — including things you thoughtlessly posted to a web site aeons ago when the Web was young. “Much of that kind of information used to be protected by “practical obscurity”: barriers arising from the time and inconvenience involved in collecting the information. Now those barriers are falling as old online-discussion postings, wedding registries and photos from school performances are becoming centralized in a searchable form on the Internet. ” [ More…]