[Air-l] internet research and confidentiality

[jeremy hunsinger]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 1:47 PM, Thomas Koenig wrote:

> 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.

sometimes protected information is released inadvertantly, on blogs as 
well as any other media.
>
> 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.

we agree then, not all web accessible information is public.
>
> 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?

there are many forms of blogs, and there are innumerable ways that 
mistakes can be made, care and judgment is required when approaching 
blogs as much as any other informational system.  I think we more or 
less agree that your former universalization "Blogging, Webpublishing 
and Usenet posting are demonstrably public activities. '" just needs 
tempered a bit, in most cases it is likely the case, but there are hard 
cases out there that demonstrate that we need to use good judgment over 
and above our assumption that they are demonstrably public.



>
> 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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