[Air-l] internet research and confidentiality

Thomas Koenig T.Koenig at lboro.ac.uk
Wed Dec 22 10:47:46 PST 2004


At 17:01 22/12/2004, jeremy hunsinger wrote:

>On Dec 22, 2004, at 10:32 AM, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>>
>>I disagree. If somebody, inadvertendly or deliberately, publishes his or her
>>blog with the false assumption of privacy, it is still public.
>
>it very much depends, in the u.s., this is unclear.  for instance, If i 
>drop my bank statement on the sidewalk, it cannot merely be republished as 
>public information.  perhaps in the u.k. and europe it too is unclear, but 
>i'd suggest looking at your local laws. certain things are private and 
>need to be regarded as such.


Even though I do not know anything about the local laws, I would be 
surprised, if it would be legal to publish and/or quote an inadvertendly 
lost bank statement anywhere in the EU. I fail to see the analogy to a 
blog, though.

Because of a simple typo, I receive many private, oftentimes sensitive, 
emails to one of my email accounts. Not in my wildest dreams I would use 
these wrongly adressed mails as data or make them accesible to anyone other 
than the sender and the intended adressee, because, obviously, I was not 
the intended adressee. That is an apprpropriate analogy for the lost bank 
statement, I think.

I also can see, that many people are not aware that some of their files are 
avalable on the web, when they store them on a common drive that happens to 
be public, i.e. pages like

http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/stuff/


(This directory appears as on the "G:" drive on my computer.

These might be off-limits, too.

How, in contrast, do you inadvertendly publish a blog?

Thomas


-- 
thomas koenig, ph.d.
department of social sciences, loughborough university
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/mmethods/staff/thomas/index.html 




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