I agree, Oblivions- frightening. But I do try to imagine something like how he might feel. Imagine, for example, if folks on the Internet decided to publish material claiming evidence that I am a cross dressing Nazi, and if other people on the Internet believed that. I’m not going to comment on whether I *am* a fascist transvestite: it could be true or false, but either way it is damaging to my reputation and concrete *proof* of any such behaviour doesn’t exist.

Now let’s further assume that the original posters are anonymous, but post on a publically accessible forum or blog. What would my actions be? How could I respond? Every time I manage to convince a blog owner to remove the unprovable posts, they would just reappear somewhere else. Perhaps my attempts to have the content removed generate further condescending responses from the blog/forum owners and participants.

Put in those terms, I could visualize circumstances under which I might resort to using the legal system the way Mr. Crooke has. Setting aside the specific instance of Mr. Crooke, it does raise some intriguing problems/questions regarding the future of the Internet.

In the world of electronic commerce, where face to face interactions become rarer and rarer, you *are* your reputation. It has become common practice now for employers to Google prospective employees. They can find an individual’s posts on MySpace, Facebook, or wherever else a person might have commented/spewed. Or wherever someone might have included that individual’s name, perhaps even in jest.

Being anonymous won’t save people either: there now exists highly accurate facial recognition software that can scan billions of photos and find matches to a reference image. So if someone ever snaps a picture of an individual worshipping the porcelain gods at a party, that image could be traced back to them even it is completely anonymous. Additionally, Google and other search engine companies have history of every search done from billions of IP addresses, and many of those anonymous posts have IP addresses…it isn’t all connected yet, but the pieces are nearly all there. And it is already scary what can be done with all that data.

When an employer has 200 resumes, the ones with “cross dressing Nazi” somewhere in their Internet history, or a photo or two of college-era binge drinking, might just get tossed into the circular file. If it has ever been published on the Internet, it is there forever- indelibly etched in the caches and “way back” archives.

Oh, and did you know that slightly more than 40% of all women and men will do a Google search on their current paramour early in a relationship? There are anonymous websites where men and women can post information on a potential date based on their supposed experiences. They can name names- the poster remains anonymous, but not the named individual. Imagine such a tool in the hands of a jilted lover, or even just the jerk in the next cubicle over? Food for thought, and it does offer another perspective on the situation of Mr. Crooke and his lawsuits.