Occasionally I’ll type my name into Google just to see what information the search engine finds with my name attached. I’m always amazed to see that some of the stuff that pops up is at least a decade old. Postings I made on the internet over the years still surface when I search for them.
Who wants to type in “Jeromy Patriquin” and see what I did ten plus years ago? Most readers probably don’t care; however, you may want to do a little research on yourselves to see what’s out there with your name attached. I guarantee you’ll be able to dig up some dirt.
The internet and digital storage has become a permanent holding place for everything. Information I wrote about hydraulics ten years ago is still viewable. My shoe size and favorite foods are still searchable on my best friend’s website even though he hasn’t maintained it in five years. That information isn’t going anywhere.
Gathering information from the cloud has become a big topic through the years – covering everything from political cover-ups to images and movies that leak to the internet. Once the information has been uploaded, there is no practical way for it to be removed. Pretty much everything on the web is stored in more than one location and many times the data is copied to other websites.
Examples of this are everywhere. Last week I talked to a customer who uploaded some pictures to the internet by mistake. She told me the pictures were of a new product she had invented and mistakenly sent to the wrong location. One of her competitors had already re-posted the pictures of the new device with an outline of design flaws.
In the case of politicians and public officials, many times documents are released and published on the web. Those documents, especially if they push a hot button, seem to spread extremely fast. By the time someone realizes the documents have been released they could have been read by thousands of people and spread to many websites.
Understanding a little about websites is somewhat important when examining this phenomenon. Websites are stored on massive computers called servers. A company like Yahoo that hosts tens of thousands of websites doesn’t centralize their servers. Rather, they spread them throughout the world. Data and websites that are uploaded to a server are stored redundantly; the same data on many pieces of equipment.
Once a website is up and running, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use a process called spidering to collect data about the site. Google actually takes a snapshot of the site and stores it in its own cache. You can check this yourself by Googling a subject and then clicking on the “cached” link under the listing. Many times an older version of the page will be displayed.
My daughter is reading over my shoulder and asked why it’s important to her. The simple answer is that many people don’t stop and think before publishing data to the internet. Pictures, movies and postings (to name a few) are uploaded every day before someone realizes they shouldn’t have put up that picture or written something embarrassing.
Within minutes after searching for my name I uncovered a detailed history of my past businesses, friends and even pictures. Luckily for me I haven’t been involved in any scandalous activities (at least none I would admit) over the years. I can guarantee that if I was involved and anything great it probably wouldn’t become viral.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can text him at (978) 413-2840 or call him directly at (978) 919-8059.)