Thanks, Stephen, for bringing this up -- I recently re-joined LSTOWN-L
after a long absence in order to raise this very issue, but you beat me to
it, and have set out the issues with great clarity.   I first learned of
this new refinement of Google searching about a month ago, when a former
subscriber to one of my lists contacted me to request that a message of
hers be removed from the list archive -- a message she had posted in
1993!  An increasingly prominent academic, she was distressed that a
colleague had, by "Googling" her name, come up with a message from her grad
school days that, however innocuous, was not something she wanted anyone to
associate with her.

      Now, it's easy to be dismissive of this seemingly obsessive eagerness
to control such things; the archives of lists and newsgroups are full to
bursting with messages that people wish they'd never posted, and living
with that mild potential for embarrassment has long seemed just a routine
part of life on the Net.  Like many listowners, I staunchly oppose the
practice of editing archives on request, for principled as well as
practical reasons that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the
recurring threads here about such editing.

   Nevertheless, I do think that my correspondent implicitly makes a case
that has to be taken seriously: i.e., that it is unfair to all the people
who posted messages to lists before the Web-based archives came along to
leave those messages so nakedly exposed to casual Google searching.  There
is no way that anyone participating in a list discussion in, say, the early
1990s could ever have imagined that their casual postings would one day be
so easily retrievable, not simply by interested colleagues, but by anyone
in the world with a Net-connected computer.  I think there's a strong
argument that in light of this new development we who maintain lists with
public archives now owe our subscribers and their postings a greater degree
of protection from casually prying eyes.

   For this reason, and because I'm also worried that this may presage
widespread spam-harvesting of addresses from list archives, I'm probably
going to take my lists' archives "private" in the near future. I hate to do
that, because the whole ethos of the lists (like that of most scholarly
lists) is the free sharing of information with anyone who wants it, and the
archives have been a wonderful public resource.  Still, the time may have
come, just as the time came (for many of us) to disable the "Review"
command or make "Send=Editor" the default or take whatever other measures
we've had to take to protect our lists in a changing online
environment.  What's certain is that we're all going to be getting more and
more of these archive-editing requests, as people come to realize the
implications of this new Google capacity.

   Like Stephen, I'd be very interested to learn what others think of all this.

Patrick

___________
Patrick Leary
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