Not only your home directory, but also your mail directory. And all of
them are readable by anybody at your site (or at least by your HTTP
server). Just stay cool. Alta Vista or any other robots will certainly
not access data that couldn't be accessed by another mean, this is
just a classical security issue.
Speaking about privacy, I feel more concerned by being cross-indexed
in multiple robots-built databases. For example, we may suppose that,
after some years of a career, you've left behind you some data about
you in many of the organizations you've worked for. A robot could
collect all these data to create a file about you. Of course, none of
these infos may be very "sensitive", but, from some kind of "holistic"
point of view, their gathering would permit to infer some interesting
properties about yourself... May be...
By the way, if every data in the world become available on the World
Wide Web, such as dictionaries, encyclopedia, personal files, and so
on, the Web may become MUCH LARGER than it's now. Have we any evidence
the index databases will be able to scale to this extent ?
+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
| | |
| Christophe TRONCHE | E-mail : tronche@lri.fr |
| | |
| +-=-+-=-+ | Phone : 33 - 1 - 69 41 66 25 |
| | Fax : 33 - 1 - 69 41 65 86 |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------+
| ###### ** |
| ## # Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique |
| ## # ## Batiment 490 |
| ## # ## Universite de Paris-Sud |
| ## #### ## 91405 ORSAY CEDEX |
| ###### ## ## FRANCE |
|###### ### |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+