Good points Rowin, I too thought that the primary ethical issue concerning the treatment of postings in publicly available postings was copyright. The notion of privacy in this case not only seems counterintuitive, it is entirely redundant. You simply cannot, as a researcher, protect the privacy of something that is already public. Secondly, it does not matter if Internet users are not savvy. The point is that nothing the researcher does should cause greater harm to persons than they may already be doing to themselves. Thirdly, consent is not an issue since the researcher did not actually solicit the information--the information was already there, in full public view. Moreover, for privacy to have been compromised means that there must have been an intrusion by a researcher. There is no intrusion involved in examining publicly available postings. I agree with a previous posting that suggested there is a "privacy for privacy's sake" undercurrent in a lot of the messages being posted to this list. At this rate, we'll soon be talking about how "unethical" it is to cite electronic documents. [Now, if you were to ask me if it's good field research practice to *not* allow someone to revise or restate their position, I would say no. If there were a way of allowing authors of public postings to have this chance, that might be the basis for a valuable conversation, perhaps much more instructive than the original posting...and then we would be back into conventional ethical guidelines as this person would be transformed into an informant, or at least a respondent.] Cheers Rowin, Max. Dr Maximilian C. Forte Assistant Professor in Anthropology Department of Anthropology and Sociology University College of Cape Breton P.O. Box 5300, Sydney, NS, Canada, B1P 6L2 Tel: 902-563-1947 Fax: 902-563-1247 E-mail: max_forte@uccb.ca Website: http://faculty.uccb.ns.ca/mforte/