"Permanent Record"

"Permanent Record" is a radio story that discusses the internet and how what we write online is, for the most part, permanent. The story mentions a variety of hot topics that address to what extent we have online privacy.
First, the show discusses Google. Google is a website that can be used to gather information for a report, look up pictures online, or, on another note, to snoop on someone's business. Let's face it, how many of us have typed in someone's name to Google just to see what comes up? I've done it before, and after listening to this article I actually Google searched myself, and found some new entries on me that I hadn't seen before. Though I'm really not too worried about being searched for online, I can see why some people may be bothered by the fact that they can be linked to various sites just by typing their name into Google and hitting "search."
Next, Nazanin Rafsanjani is interviewed. Nazanin wrote an email to iranian.com after 9/11 expressing her concerns and where her trust stood at that point in time. She was 19 at the time, and now many years later still is embarrassed and horrified that this article cannot be erased. Soon after she wrote the email, she wrote to the website asking to erase the entry that she had written. To Nazanin's surprise, the website wrote back that it could not be erased, that everything on that website was permanent. Now, a few years later, Nazanin finds it discomforting that she is unable to erase something personal that she wrote just because she submitted it online. This is true with many websites on the internet. Facebook and Myspace are great examples of websites in which people pour out there feelings and unknowingly write something traced to their name that is permanent. This is a reason why I personally try not to reveal too much of myself on my Facebook page. I know some people who blog often and enjoy writing all of their feelings down online for everyone to see, yet I don't think this is the smartest idea. What if, in the future, someone was trying to get a job with a big company, and this company searched for that person's name on Google and found a silly blog they had written on Facebook in which that person poured out all of their personal feelings and ideas, no matter how embarrassing they were?
Last of all, Emily Nussbaum is interviewed. Emily wrote an article about life online, and talks about key points on privacy and the internet. She discusses an idea of "chronicle asynchrony," that is, how someone can write something in 1990 and another person can respond to this same entry in 2003. The internet doesn't erase itself, no matter how old websites or blog entries may be. Some other bothersome ideas about the internet is that everything is linked, everything is searchable, and the concept of "invisible audiences"- that is, people can read stuff about you and you will never have any clue who read it.