Every two months, it scoops up the entire Web and stores the results on its virtual shelves. It has preserved my expired site, and it may well have yours. Similarly, postings to the Internet's 33,000 news groups may fall off the edge of Usenet after a week or so, but they live on in databases such as Deja News and the Internet Archive. Marie Coady, a freelance writer in Woburn, Mass., was appalled to discover that her posts to online-news, a small, cozy listserv of 1,350 news professionals, was available to anyone through dozens of search engines on the Web. In light of our litigious society, it could be dangerous to post any message at all.
Many moderators post occasional notices about a list's public archiving policy.
But not all do, and few users read the fine print, anyway. You can easily imagine in 20 years a candidate being asked about a conversation he had in a chat room while he was in college. We're becoming a world where everything is recorded. The answers are hardly comforting, especially for those given to strong displays of emotion or opinion online. It is suddenly becoming impossible to escape your past.