I am writing today to express some concerns my friends and I have had for about a year now. I am a High School North graduate, Class of 2009, and I am writing to inform you of my concerns as a recently graduated senior. The WW-P News and website publish personal information to search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and others, that should concern those who have their information published to the web.
In my situation in particular, the News posts the names of all graduating seniors from both High School North and South. With this information anyone in the whole globe can just type your name into Google and know exactly what town you live in, how old you are, and full legal name, also which high school you graduated from. This information could potentially help predators search for students identities.
Such information could also be used to aid hackers to compromise web accounts such as Facebook or E-mail. For example if one of the security questions for forgetting your password is what high school you went to or what town you grew up in, maiden name; hackers could use this information to read through E-mails, stalk Facebook friends, steal your identity or even if they’re lucky steal bank account numbers. This information is available to everyone on the Internet, people in other countries, anyone with a computer and your name.
I am writing to you to inquire about taking such web pages down to keep the security and privacy of our town’s seniors safe. Another resolution I propose is to keep the web pages on the Internet but not publish that specific http url to Google’s search interface. With the website hosting service wwpinfo uses, the web pages can be exempt from Google’s indexing service and the webpage will not be viewable from typing a student’s name into Google.
The webpage will still be viewable when linked to, but just not indexed. Please help me in the fight for our graduates’ privacy and safety, mine included.
Matt Befi
Editor Richard K. Rein replies: We are asked on occasion to delete archived material — youthful indiscretions, for example — from our website. We turn down the request because we don’t want to be in the position of selectively rewriting history.
This request — to keep good news out of the hands of search engines — is a first. We are rejecting the idea because we do not think it will increase the security of anyone’s online identity and because we think our archives in their own small way can help create a positive online view of the people we write about. Say that another Matt Befi in another part of the world gets caught in some heinous behavior. If our Matt Befi is applying for a job, wouldn’t he benefit if a Google search by a prospective employer revealed that he was a 2009 North graduate? That’s our opinion.What do you think?
