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From Ethan Zuckerman, Vice President of Research & Development:

I got a card the other day from an ex-girlfriend, a woman I haven't seen in person since 1990, and who I haven't corresponded with since 1992. In it, she congratulated me on Tripod's success, the recent article in Spin magazine about Tripod, my impending marriage, and mentioned that she enjoyed my fiancee's poetry, and wished us good luck writing a wedding ceremony that respected her Jewish heritage and my Christian traditions.

That scared me.

Okay, so it's not Scream 2, or even the Amityville Horror, but it scared me nevertheless. I'm used to my private life being private, and I started to have paranoid fantasies about my ex hiring private detectives to track me around scenic Williamstown. These fantasies led immediately to a mental replay of the scene at the end of the Blues Brothers where Carrie Fisher turns a flamethrower on a tank of propane in the hopes of blowing up her jilting ex, John Belushi.

To be fair, our breakup was a peaceful one, my ex is a very nice person, and, to the best of my knowledge I've never been stalked by a psychopath with a flamethrower. Yet.

I did the only thing a rational person could do. I booked a one-way flight to Bogota and began packing. And then, coming to my senses, I wrote her a letter. I thanked her for her card, inquired about her boyfriend and her PhD thesis, and asked how in hell she'd dug up so much personal information on me!

Her response, a few days later was succinct and somewhat mocking: "Well, I came across your photo in Spin by chance, and thought I'd find out what you're up to. I typed your name into AltaVista and your fiancée's page came up as the top match. Everything else is on her page."

She's right — a simple search for my name on Altavista pulls up 10383 documents — the first one on the list is titled "Rachel Barenblat and Ethan Zuckerman: Wedding." So much for keeping a low profile.

I'm starting to get used to the fact that the Web has made it easier for people to get in touch with old friends. It's wonderful that, when you remember an old friend, a few Web queries will frequently bring up that person's e-mail address, phone number and data on what he or she is doing.

What I haven't gotten used to is the idea that this information is so easily cross-referenced. I knew that Rachel had put up a page about our wedding, but it hadn't occured to me that people searching for my name would find her page. It doesn't worry me too much that someone looking for information on me can find out that I'm getting married — but I can imagine scenarios that do worry me. Like my ex looking up my street address on switchboard.com and showing up at my house.

Or this: Imagine you're applying for a jo. The interview goes well, you're confident that your references will speak well of you. Two days later, you get a call telling you that you're no longer in consideration for the position. You ask why, and your formerly-prospective employer explains that, while searching for information about you on the Web, he found some short fiction you wrote and posted to your personal homepage. Based on the fiction you wrote, he thinks you're pscyhologically unstable and a poor fit for the team you'd be working with. You're out of luck.

Sound absurd? It's very similar to what happened to Cameron Barrett, who lost his job at an advertising agency in Michigan when co-workers read some fiction he'd posted to his personal Web site, found it disturbing, and decided they were uncomfortable working with him. (Find out more at Cameron's site: www.camworld.com) Or to what recently happened to Navy sailor Senior Chief Petty Officer Tim McVeigh (no relation to the Oklahoma Tim McVeigh) who was removed of duty because one of his member profiles on AOL identified him as gay. (It's possible he is gay — it's also possible that he was maintaining multiple ficticious identities on AOL, one of which was gay.)

Putting together pieces of information about a person into a conherent portrait used to be the job of private investigators, policemen and other professionals. Now it's in the power of a smart Internet user who knows her way around a search engine.

The moral of the story? I'm not really sure: don't let your fiancée post pages about your wedding? Or maybe "Know thyself — and while you're at it, know what an interested observer could find about about thyself if she cared to look"?

Me, I'm off to find out what strange secrets the net holds about our Chairman...

-- Ethan (1/23/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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