[Air-l] internet research and confidentiality

[jeremy hunsinger]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 10:32 AM, Thomas Koenig wrote:

> Selon jeremy hunsinger <jhuns at vt.edu>:
>
>>>> At 11:48 AM 12/21/2004, Thomas Koenig wrote:
>>>>> Blogging, Webpublishing and Usenet posting are demonstrably public
>>>>> activities. '
>>
>> they are clearly and demonstrably public if and only if there is no
>> assumption of privacy built into blog.
>
> We thus agree on Usenet and webpublishing.

yes, broadcast usenet is public, private applications of usenet do 
exist though.  and in generally, publishing is publishing is 
publishing, it is not a simple question, certain things are published 
and we have rights to, and certain things may or may not be published 
and we have rights to, and certain things may not have been published 
at all, are stolen or appropriated and nothing is clear about who has 
rights to what, where, when, and how, and there we have to be careful, 
which is the key point is that you should do a minimally diligent 
investigation and not just 'assume' things are what they might appear 
to be from your view.  If a binary which is distributed under an 
individual license is 'published' on a bulletin board, you probably do 
not have any rights to it. or  for instance, if I'm at the university 
and certain parts of the material are published in my view, are they 
published for everyones view or are they limited to only people on the 
university network, (this is less of a problem with universities than 
perhaps with corporations into knowledge management and control).  we  
have to be aware that what we see on the internet because of our 
situation in the world may not be as clearly defined as we think.   We 
may in fact be seeing things on the internet that we have licensed or 
otherwise accepted other forms of rights limitations, assumptions 
about, and therefore need to be careful to ensure that what we are 
viewing is within the bounds of our current regime of laws, norms, etc.
>
>> an assumption of privacy might
>> be having to login to view the blog, or being inside a password
>> protected system, or being in a community of blogs in which some data
>> is only viewable by certain members of the community.  those are case
>> that move the blog toward requiring confidentiality because the 
>> authors
>> have an assumption that some of their information is only for
>> friends/family/themselves, etc.  if there are no known access barriers
>> to the information, then yes, it is likely public, but we have to take
>> care because it will not always be obvious.
>
> 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 a
> password is not always sufficient basis for a claim to privacy. Many 
> of the
> password protected message boards, where oftentimes binaries are 
> exchanged,
> are password protected through an automated system, that's still 
> public, as
> the only reason for the password is the avoidance of indexing through 
> search
> machines.

here i agree in principle, but we have to make sure we understand and 
can represent the situation, because in other cases, that password may 
in fact represent a barrier to access and thus ensure privacy, it 
depends on the situation, the group, and is not universal.

>
> On the other hand, if someone creates a "blog" purely for his
> family/friends/etc. and password protects it, then, of course, I am not
> allowed to hack the site or use means of deception to gain access. That
> should go without saying. Even if I would be a legitimate friend of the
> person, the data would be off-limits.

i agree.

>
> To me, all these exceptions appear obvious, so maybe our differences 
> boil
> simply down to semantics.
>

well my basic argument is to not take our assumptions about the data at 
face value, but to actually make sure we are clearly using public data 
or ethically acquired data.    i don't think we can make universal 
statements about what is public or private because that is hotly 
contested and there is no universally agreement.  we have to make some 
effort to know about our data and be able to make our case should that 
be required.  we should not just assume everything on the web is 
public, because it clearly isn't, nor should we assume that any data we 
can acquire from the web is going to be public, we have to make sure 
that it is public before we use it as public.


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