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