The internet as an archive:
While significantly different from the traditional archives that we have visited (the British Museum, the Tate and so on), the Internet never the less is an archive of vast proportions. This becomes acutely noticeable when we interact with social media sites that house extensive amounts of data on individuals.
The group Europe v. Facebook has levied a number of complaints against the company, challenging the misleading language used on the site (language which attempts to disguise the archival nature of the site):
The group challenged, for example – the fact that ‘pokes’ are kept after a user “removes” them, postings and messages that had been deleted still showed up on sets of data received from Facebook, Facebook gathers personal data through synchronization with its iPhone-App and can use this without consent of the data subject. The list goes on….
While significantly different from the traditional archives that we have visited (the British Museum, the Tate and so on), the Internet never the less is an archive of vast proportions. This becomes acutely noticeable when we interact with social media sites that house extensive amounts of data on individuals.
The group Europe v. Facebook has levied a number of complaints against the company, challenging the misleading language used on the site (language which attempts to disguise the archival nature of the site):
The group challenged, for example – the fact that ‘pokes’ are kept after a user “removes” them, postings and messages that had been deleted still showed up on sets of data received from Facebook, Facebook gathers personal data through synchronization with its iPhone-App and can use this without consent of the data subject. The list goes on….
How can this data affect us, and what rights do we have for it to be removed upon request? On the Media recounts the story of a young man going into teaching who cannot escape his past given the Internet’s archive of him.
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