The Boston Globe Online wrote a story in Feb 2003 of how the world’s most preferred search engine – Google – is changing what we can find out about one another.

Excerpt from the cover story :

Michael is a clean-cut 34-year-old working in a professional job at a Boston medical school. You’d never know he did time for burglary and is a former drug addict. Well, actually, you would if you Googled him… The search, Google proudly notes, takes just a 10th of a second…

Michael has never hidden from his past, and in his 20s, he even wrote for a few specialized publications about his brief stint behind bars as a 17-year-old. He was happy to share his exploits with that sliver of the population genuinely interested in the issues of incarceration. But Michael never saw Google coming…

The first tool truly to make sense of the white noise that is the Internet, Google has become essential research for everyone…But somewhere along the path toward changing our daily lives, Google changed our concept of time as well. It has helped make our past – or oddly refracted shards of it – present and permanent. That’s a radical notion for a medium usually defined by its ability to constantly update itself.

In fact, a search on Google for “google big brother” will also throw up a few links to pages dedicated towards unearthing the other unethical issues affecting the search engine.

While no one can deny the role Google has played in making our now-connected lives easier, thanks to an amazingly accurate and efficient search facility, I think the article does raise some very valid concerns about the role of Technology and the limits it should follow.

After all, we all have something in our pasts that we wish we could have done differently, don’t we? 😉