Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

A little scrap of tissue, layered a half dozen times

For some reason, I seem to attract “you must delete this post NOW” requests on a regular basis, even though what I post is rather mundane. The current such request happened yesterday when a minor employee of a literally unknown startup company emailed me the following:

Please call me regarding the following web:

ojos-inc.com seems quite dead–I have removed those two datum from the public view.

If you are having difficulty with spam and telemarketing, I suggest you review the National Do Not Call Registry and software like spam-assassin (linux) and POPfile (windows).

I thought the problem was solved, until I got a call today demanding that I “take down the page” and that the “information there was not supposed to be known to the public.” This call and the fact that their website(s) are dead made me extremely curious and outraged. I was infuried that he had lied to me about the reason for editing the page–if it really were spam he cared for, my edits would have been enough. But, then I became curious about a funded startup company that could exist with so little known about it. I dug around a little, and posted the results of my findings. My best guess is that they are planning to start an intuitive image search engine.

I don’t know if this is an appropriate way to handle this. In a sense, the post is now gone. In another sense, it’s been replaced with more damning information–literally everything I can find out about them, some of which was lingering in various search engines’ (I tried 5 or 6 different ones) caches. I suppose the lesson to learn about myself is that if there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s duplicitous request to curb the flow of information. It’s my strong conviction that everone should have the right to discover anything about anything.

In moral terms: is it right to write an arbitrary exposé?

The famous picture:

Yes, you too can see Saddam in his underwear, half-naked for the world to admire!