Re: Alta Vista searches WHAT?!?
Mark Schrimsher (mschrimsher@twics.com)
Wed, 17 Jan 1996 12:00:59 +0900
At 0:00 AM 1/17/96, Tronche Ch. le pitre wrote:
>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...
This is really the issue, I think, but the main problem is Usenet archives
and mailing list archives, not indexing normal web pages. HTML documents
tend to disappear, and presumably they would be eliminated from the robots
index eventually. Archives tend to be permanent, and the participants in
newsgroups and especially mailing lists are often not aware they're writing
for posterity.
--Mark