There has been some chatter lately about MEDLIB-l's Archives being accessible to the general public through Google. I think some people were surprised that somebody could look at the virtual bread crumbs in Google and get information. Others I think were frustrated with their daily spam intake which they believed might be partly a result of their email addresses showing up on sig files in the MEDLIB-l posts.

Of course these days our emails are on everything and spammers have more than just MEDLIB-l to munch on. Our library web pages, articles, meeting minutes, vendor information cards at annual meetings, and of course all of those online commerce sites have our email addresses.

As the online world starts to permeate our daily lives we become more visible to the world in ways we never envisioned. For example, we all like the discounts offered through our grocery membership cards, but many people in society do not realize their buying habits, their profile, their address is all on file so that the grocery store can offer targeted coupons enticing them to return to the store to spend more. As an athlete (ok I use that term very loosely these days) I enjoy registering online for competitions, viewing online results, and pictures from competitions. Of course anybody can do the same thing and search for and find it on Google.

For an experiment I decided to search for myself using my maiden name. I graduated college the year after Netscape went public. I am young but not young enough to have much of an online presence during my teen years and my college years. Back then I was playing with Gopher and IRC, but there definitely wasn't anything like MySpace. I was prepared to see some things from my time at graduate school, but I had no idea my athletic endeavors from college and high school were also available online as well as a smattering of a few other things. Hmm.

Unless we are prepared to "go off the grid" completely we are probably going to have to get used to a certain lack of anonymity and spam within our lives. We can take some precautions to limit exposure a little, but nothing will keep us completely anonymous. Because, all of the modern conveniences we take for granted help create our online shadow of where we have been, which can be seen by anybody walking by and looking.