Tracing someone on the Internet

It has become quite easy to trace someone on the Internet. If I only look at the details I leave on several places on the Internet, it is quite easy for 'researchers' to find these traces. A small sample is the Update list of the Fluxus Heidelberg Center, of which I am the webmaster. If someone looks at that place, he/she can discover that a new calendar-file is just uploaded, and all details Litsa Spathi and I did for the Center can be found there.

Also the online-groups, forums, E-mailing-lists. They are all stored somewhere and the search-engines pick up the information. Just 'mine the internet' (as they call it) and you can find lots of clues of what someone has been up to these last years.

There occurs a problem as well. Some people think that all the data will actually stay on the Internet for indefinite time. That isn't so. When a firm that hosts a site goes bankrupt, all information is lost. If someone doesn't pay for the hosting of information, it too vanishes. That happens quite often these days. Lots of broken links on the Internet.

Some Search-engines do keep Cache-data online. They have stored the information they found on their own server. But how many data do they keep. For how many years? A college of mine once made a joke: In 2080 a researcher will find out that there is almost no information available from the timeperiode 1998 till 2050, because all the information on the Internet wasn't permanently stored on paper....... Yes, all those CD's people burn themselves only have a limited life-time. We might loose all we produce, and only the printouts have a longer life than we do.

Do we care? Is what we do now worth saving?

Ruud