Tuesday 8th January 2013

Have you ever Googled your name?

For the John Smith’s amongst you that is a pretty pointless thing to do, because how would you know which one was you? What then for those of us with a more unusual name?

I am such who is blessed, or cursed, with an unusual name. A quick Google search will reveal just the two of us; there is one who is a person who does charity runs, rates double glazing installers and is ‘looking for new challenges’ on Linkedin. Then there is me: international Playboy and Quality Expert, photographer, music geek, blogger and freelance booze rater.

The other guy only came on line in the last 18 months, so if you look through Google much of that stuff is me; all the albums on Amazon I have rated, the booze I have rated, comments on the BBC website and all the other stuff I did before I grew up and joined the adult world and left the RAF!

Take the name John Harrison; which of these below is John?

The inventor of the marine chronometer,
The baddie in the new Star Trek film,
JT i sued to work with at RAF Coltishall,
HV SAP on the Thanet windfarm project?

Answer is all of them or course. And I am sure that if I were to Google John Harrison I would find many, many more. I'm sure there are even more John Smiths than there are John Harrisons so they don't have the problem I have that when they Google their own name they will usually find someone else, whereas I Google my name and I find myself. Or the other bloke.

You will also find my online name I use on most sites; I share that with a type of fishing lure; so it’s either me or fish bait! The alternate spelling version I sometimes use is because I forgot my password using the original spelling back in 1999 when setting up my first e mail account; I ten got control of that back when the time limit ran out.

I mention all this stuff because, as was pointed out on a Radio 4 show last night, the internet does not forget. Everything you have ever done online is still there, and not just in the place you did it, as it is backed up on servers all round the planet. And it is very hard to get it deleted. Very hard. Delete it in one place and it lives on somewhere else. Although my Facebook account has been deleted, it still exits somewhere as it shows up on the first few pages of a Google search, so I guess Facebook does not delete all their data, and might even be keeping it. Potential employers now do a trawl online to see if what you might have said in your application was true, or what you really get up to in your time off.

What is clear too is that if someone writes something untrue about you, there is very little you can do about it. You might be able to get it deleted if you have the cash to take it through the courts, but it is probably searchable from Google.com rather than Google.co.uk. The question is, or the point is, should the internet be allowed to ‘forget’.

If it is to be allowed, then what should it have to remember, i.e. not be allowed to be deleted. Anyway, you can listen to the show here for the next 6 days: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pnn4m