[Air-L] public private

[Bram Dov Abramson]

This is probably getting away from the IRB focus, but Lior 
Strahilevitz, a legal scholar, had a good article a few years back 
entitled "A Social Networks Theory of Privacy", suggesting some ways 
to think through the discomfort which many -- rightly, I think -- have 
with seeing public/private applied as a binary distinction to speech:

"This paper argues that insights from the emerging literature on 
information transmission through social networks can help courts 
develop a more rigorous and objective notion of 'privacy' for the 
purposes of the privacy torts. It argues that privacy tort law should 
not focus on the abstract, circular, and highly indeterminate question 
of whether a plaintiff reasonably expected that information about 
himself would remain 'private' after he shared it with one or more 
persons. Instead, the law should focus on the more objective and 
satisfying question of what extent of dissemination the plaintiff 
should have expected to follow his disclosure of that information to 
others."

cheers
Bram