Last weekend I was alerted to two new phenomena, both of which caused me to miss a heartbeat. The first was the possibility of using a program, or employing someone, to “suicide” you online. Recently a company in Rotterdam used its Facebook presence to advertise its “web 2.0 suicide machine”, which would act as “a digital Dr Kevorkian [and] delete your online presence” not just on your own sites but on everyone else’s — leaving just a few “last words”. Unfortunately Facebook chucked the suicide machine off its premises, so it then suicided itself, ending with the words “no flowers, no speeches”. As a journalist I was horrified by the implications of online suiciding. In the first place it means the erasure of documentary history. And second it raises the possibility of routine doctoring of material on the internet to render it more palatable to the offended.

　　The second phenomenon was worse. It was that some people, many perhaps, might seek to undermine any informational authority on the web by flooding it with false information, thus obliquely protecting their own identities. As an occasional target of such misinformation, playfully or maliciously, I know it can play merry hell with everyone’s sense of reality. In other words it seemed to me that there was a threat much worse than that to privacy, and that was of privacy- induced attempts to bend or erase the truth that is essential to the value of the internet. Lack of privacy may be uncomfortable. Lack of truth is fatal.