The Internet Eraser

Hello Bloggers! This is LESSON ELEVEN in my continuing series THE BLOGGING CLASS!

My Mission: To benefit every blogger, in every way, every time, every day!

It's quite unusual for information to vanish from the internet. But it does happen! There have been more than a few times when I've found a picture or text about someone and then when I went back to look it a month or two or three later, it could not be found. There are still a few posts on this blog that bear dead links because the pages at those urls were deleted by the website or weblog owner(s).

(Arissa Cheo aka Arissa Luna, Cheo Zhen Shan) HATES THIS PICTURE ::: the Fashion & Media Entrepreneur/Famous Singaporean Heiress used her clout and Ca$h to have blogs decommissioned that have carried it! (Except for this one I've linked to (click on Arissa's Eyes), and who knows how long it will last!)

Not too many people have success at wiping their digital footprints off the world wide web:

Scores of Spaniards lay claim to a "Right to be Forgotten" because public information once hard to get is now so easy to find on the Internet. [deTailS]

Below is a snippet of an article that Adam Thierer posted April 17th 2011 on forbes:::"Last December, Common Sense Media, an influential media watchdog and online safety organization, proposed letting kids or their parents delete information that children or teens had put online but later regretted. “Web companies should develop tools that make it easier for young people — or their parents — to completely opt out and delete this information,” the organization argued. They called it the Internet “Eraser Button.”

A similar idea is currently being considered across the Atlantic. The European Union, which has far more sweeping privacy controls than the U.S., is now considering a so-called “right to be forgotten” online. The E.U. defines it as “the right of individuals to have their data… deleted when they are no longer needed for legitimate purposes.”

While U.S. policymakers have yet to embrace so far-reaching a concept, a bill introduced this week by Senators John Kerry and John McCain mandates “data minimization” by website operators, which could provide an opening for broader regulation. Some congressional Democrats are rumored to be interested in the Eraser Button concept."

I suggest anytime you see something you may want to keep, save it on your PC or use one of the bookmarking services. To save an entire visual, hit the "PrintScreen" button, open Paint and then CTRL+V, save the image as a JPEG. You can also "save the entire webpage" to a file.

If a page has recently disappeared, it may still exist in Google's cache. Should you locate it there, you definitely want to do the PrintScreen method on it!

Sometimes material is still out there, but you have to know the exact URL because it's fallen off search engine's radar.

From 2007::: (Hmmm... wonder how many of the following links are still "alive"?!?) A very curious case: Mai Shiozaki. A friend from one of the local TV stations wanted to see a picture of Ms. Shiozaki. Now, this woman is a TV anchor and reporter. Should be no problem to find a picture. Wrong! Whatever search engine she checked, my friend kept getting messages like: We did not find results for "Mai Shiozaki". How can this be?

Perhaps Ms. Shiozaki used a service like THIS.

But there still exist digital clues, remnants of what may have happened:

Marblehead P.D. confirms Tara Arnold or her father dropped a dime on WKOW's Mai Shiozaki by sending copies of the one year old police report to her corporate managers at WKOW and to the local Madison newspaper. They should really feel proud of themselves for further destroying the life of Mai Shiozaki and any possibility of gainful employment in the TV biz for her. When does someone suffer enough for a mistake they made in the past and are now sorry for making? When will the very business Mai Shiozaki yearns to work for stop reprinting an old gossip column article from a Boston rag which unfortunately keeps showing up on Google and ruining her chances of working again? (source)

Fast Forward to 2011 - Mai Shiozaki has returned to the web on a limited basis, it would seem!

And then we have the phenom of UNPUBLISHING A BLOG...

You might also enjoy these posts ::: How To DELETE your Facebook pages.

TechRadar UK ::: 24 hours back on 56k dial-up: what's it like?

Tags: internet eraser, be anonymous on the internet