Found this article quite interesting as it referred to something that had recently happened to Andy on Facebook.

And I always assumed that any pictures taken of me before I had graduated from college were forever safe from Google’s tentacles.

That was until Caroline, a high-school friend’s little sister, joined Facebook. She scanned a batch of her pics from the late ’80s and early ’90s, posted them to her page, and tagged them—identifying the people in pictures and, if they were on Facebook, announcing to their entire networks that these photos had been uploaded.

The author goes on to talk about how violated he felt by this and how in some ways, for people of his age (i.e. my age) it represented a clash of spheres: the last decade of the digitial, and our previous life, captured in fading photo albums gathering dusts in peoples attics. This is what makes the sense of violation all the more palpable; one does not expect to be confronted with scanned pictures of the various horrendous haircut and fashion disasters on ones youth, especially not when all your current set of digital and real life friends you are linked to on Facebook get alerted to its presence as well.

I think Andy’s pic was some embarrassing one from his youth. I think he was resolved to find some equally embarrassing pic of the person who tagged him, to hunker down for some major league tag wars. Surely though, there should be something within Facebook that allows you has the person being tagged to ‘approve’ that tag before all of your network get to see it. No wonder I don’t use it. Although I do of course get away with posting more contemporary pics of Andy, but then, hardly anybody visits this little backwater of the internet compared to his 100+ friends on Facebook.