[Ravensfort] Question of Privacy from Domesday Book

[Eadric Anstapa]

 ladyoliviar at lycos.com wrote:
> 
> Greetings all,
> 
> An issue of information privacy has come up for me.  I, out of
> kicks and grins, did an online search for my mundane name and..
> my info from the Domesday book on the RF site showed up.  Name,
> address, phone number...and I'm not comfortable with this. 
> it's one thing for someone to find it via the actual website
> but another to just type in my name and get it.  Fortunately
> the info is a bit outdated but still...
> 
> Is there anything we can do about this?
> 
> Olivia

As a general rule there is little you can do about the information
being in the search engines.   Once anything has been posted on the
web for any period of time it will eventuiually wind up in the
indexes of the various serach engines.  

First and formost you should only publish information that you wish
to be publicly assessable.  In Gates Edge our online Domesday book
is not updated by the vscribe.  Eacc member adds/removes/updates
their own listings and makes their own decision regarding what
information (if any) to share and how to share it.

Your online Domesday book could easy be password protected.  This
would keep the vast majority of search engines out.  Ofcourse that
also means that the information is harder to get to by legitimate
users. 

You web minister should also configure a file on your server asking
well behaved search engines to ingonre certain files and
directories.  The web minister creates a file called  robots.txt  in
the root of your web server.  That file contains a set of directives
for search engines and the well behaved search engines will always
check that file before scanning your site.

Regards,

-- 
Eadric Anstapa
Ansteorra
eadric at scabrewer.com