A friend of mine owns an x-box 360, Microsoft's latest gaming console. The other day, he received an email from Microsoft offering him a month of x-box live for free.

X-box live is the online gaming experience offered by Microsoft. For most games, it consists of some sort of online multiplayer game and a chance to compare your performance in a game with that of others.

It also has a chance to interact with other gamers more directly. Every gamer creates an account. Whenever you play a game online, your username appears for all other members in the forum to see. You can also send text messages and, in most games, there is the option for a shared audio channel.

When my friend received his free month of x-box live, and asked if I would like to create an account, I didn't think much of it. I entered an old email address from hotmail that I now have little use for. I was pretty surprised when, from that email address alone, the x-box told me my full name, phone number, and my home address including postal code.

Where did it come from. The information my friend's x-box regurgitated to me was taken from the user profile of my old hotmail account. Had I spent more time filling out the profile when I created it 9 years ago, the x-box would have been able to tell me more about myself.

I didn't know how to feel when confronted with this information. Having just given the machine my password, I didn't feel that my information was in danger of being leaked. It did make me realize, however, that there must be an amazing wealth of useless information stored somewhere in the bowls of the internet.

For me, the information was still fairly accurate. My name hadn't changed, neither had my phone number, and my parents still live at the same address. This certainly would not be the case for everyone who started an hotmail account 9 years ago. How much outdated information is hotmail hanging on to, if for no other reason than for it to pop up on a gaming console years down the road?

Having no easy answer to my question, I decided to do a little updating of my own. I went through all of the old emails still filed away in my hotmail account (my own outdated archive) and discovered several other accounts I had forgotten about. I remembered that I had an account at purevolume.com which still refered to me as "an aspiring teenage musician", and an online account with an east coast credit union that, while I closed my account with them a long time ago, was still able to identify my name in its records.

These are, undoubtedly, not the only places on the net that I have left my digital signature; just the ones I was able to stumble back across easily.

All this sifting through old information has given me some appreciation of the vastness of the internet. Like I said before, I did not feel scared or threatened by how well my friend's x-box knew me. It was only offering information I had at some point in time made available. It did leave me feeling that there must be an enormous amount of redundant and useless information out there to be sifted through; that the digital archive repeats itself endlessly.