The expectation of privacy argument is a slippery slope. I think it is important to work through the slippery slime but we cant forget its still slippery and will never be clear-cut. Here is my thinking on the topic. The teens I study have made a decision, knowledgeable or not, to post their blogs on public spaces. As many of us who study teens have found in discussions with young blog authors, they know their blogs are publicly accessible but dont think anyone but their friends would want to read their posts (see Bortree, 2005, March). Is that an expectation of privacy or the authors ignoring the possibility that their public musings will not be overlooked? These are not equivalent terms, an expectation of privacy implies that they understood their work was private I can say that as well but if Im disclosing private personal information to a single person, but Im doing so on a cell phone in a crowded elevator its not private even if I want to think that it is. As for the audience issue, whose definition of audience gains primacy? I really think this is the core of the of the public/private debate in that we all use the word audience but we mean totally different things by the term. Does the authors intended audience get the most points, even though the work is available to anyone who has access to an internet connection? Does the actual audience count more than the authors intentions, personally I never thought anyone outside my department would read my blog I was wrong the actual audience is quite different than my initial intended audience. Plus the text itself has an implied intended audience, what if the authors stated intentions and their communicative ones differ? The only way to respectfully judge an authors choice of an intended audience is to ask them, otherwise we are using mind-reading to protect those we see and vulnerable in some fashion. I will say here that I have much more problem with the idea of mind-reading peoples intentions than I have with saying publicly accessible communication is overheard or equivalent to a letter to the editor, and therefore open country for research. I know other disciplines have struggled with the mind-reading part of the intent debate. Because those struggles have gone before us and IRBs have a history to judge the overheard conversation between two people in a public venue. Check out sociology and anthropology literature, among other disciplines, to see how they handle overheard dialogue. Reference List Bortree, D. (2005, March). Presentation of self on the web: An ethnographic study of teenage girls' weblogs. Education, Communication & Information, 5(1), 25-39. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com