[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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