Re-editing history

There's an interesting AP story today about Spam Arrest's efforts to get Web sites to delete references to it's having sent out spam in the past -- a practice the Mercer Island company insists has long since stopped.

It's hardly the first company to try, as one critic put it, "retroactively editing reality."

Here at SeattlePI.com, we have received requests from other businesses asking us to remove outdated -- and, yes, arguably negative -- stories about them from our site. Here's our standard reply, in the words of our general manager, Lee Rozen:

If you have a specific error in the story that you would like corrected, please let us know. As you know, we have tens of thousands of stories available on our site that could be classified as outdated and irrelevant today, but that nonetheless constitute snapshots of how events unfolded in the Seattle area in the past few years.

As a general rule, we don't delete such stories.

(No, we haven't heard from Spam Arrest. But then, the only old story we still have online about it is hardly negative.)