As many people know, Tiger Woods, widely considered to be one of the world's greatest athletes, has recently tarnished his squeaky-clean, family-man image by involving himself in numerous night-club liaisons with a plethora of mistresses, with names such as Jamie Jungers and Kalika Moquin, all captured in texts and voice-mail messages. I personally have read numerous articles, with sub-titles such as "Sex addict golfer had 18-month affair with golf fan's girlfriend and trawled Las Vegas clubs picking up blondes" and "Tiger Woods, the $8 An-Hour Diner Waitress, and the Deal that Kept Their Affair Out of the News." Life seems to be looking down at Woods, whose not-so-secret love life was actually discovered after his texts and message were leaked to the media, but in the midst of this chaos, a fascinating issue was born: how long, and where, do they actually take our texts, emails, and voice-mail messages?
I recently read an excelent article on the Daily Beast, entitled, "Tiger's Digital Sex Trap," which not only delved into the gofler's reputation-demise, but also the issue of where our technological existance actually goes, after we have "deleted it." As the article states, "If you delete a Gmail message, it is stored for 30 days, and then, according to Google, 'permanently removed from Gmail.' But what does that really mean? Removed from "Gmail" doesn't necessarily mean removed from all Google servers. In fact, your old emails are the data set from which Google models our behaviors—the real product it is offering its advertisers." As we all know, Google is, first-and-formest an advertising company, so it only makes sense that they would store our messages for research, but are our names connected to them? According to Tiger Woods, I am sure the answer to this question in "yes." Though legally, companies cannot release allegedly "deleted" texts, it still seems to happen, such as in the case of Mr. Woods. Not only were his texts discovered, but also his voice-mail message in which he told one of his mistresses to dissasociate her name from her phone, for fear that his wife would use caller-ID to track the number. When the author of the article, Douglas Ruskoff, asked his "best phone experts where [his] SMS messages go to die, and if they ever do. Are they gone, or never really deleted. The overwhelming answer from them all? 'Bet on 'never deleted.'" This innconvient truth may not be "2 hawt" but at least our somwhat innocent convorsations aren't the decyaing carcasses of internation tabloids, such as in the case of the incredibly stupid, and a tad-unlucky Tiger Woods.
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