My tinfoil-hatted Beloved aside, everyone is online. The internet is so pervasive in our daily lives: email, banking, games, dating, on-line education, libraries, movies. When's the last time you went more than 24hrs off-line?
What are reasonable measures the average person should be expected to take to preserve her privacy? My internet presence is more likely to be discovered through my friend/colleague network than it is by someone deliberately searching for me. Years ago, I came into work and saw a co-worker reading my blog. I hadn't shared this activity with her, although I had shared the link with a few friends from work. Presumably, one of them shared it with her. I wonder if that is how Ms. Munroe was discovered. I don't use full names, although I do share pictures. Doesn't everyone?
In Ms. Munroe's case, is the school board in a fury that she wrote about her students and her job on the internet? Or that she wrote about them in such unflattering terms?
It's one thing to write intellectually about your job -- like, what worked/what didn't, etc. -- and something else to talk trash about your students. I'd argue that one shouldn't write about students at all without their permission, regardless of whether what one is writing is positive or negative. I should probably not be writing about my children; and in fact I've tried these last 2 years to write only very generally about them.
ReplyDeleteAs for your privacy question, I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking what measures a person should take to ensure no one writes about her or posts a video of her w/o her permission? Or are you asking what measures a person should take to ensure that her pseudoymous self and her real identity are never tied?
Jen
The latter. I think it is accepted that you can't be on the internet w/o being discoverable/hacked. There is no 100% safe option. So what is reasonable to expect? And I don't believe she was speaking about a student specifically, but more of a "what is with the state of today's youth" general rant.
ReplyDeleteWhat I was trying to say before about legal but not ethical: I agree that it likely was a poor professional choice, but I am not sure I agree she did anything wrong. Based on my very limited understanding of the situation, it's possible she took "reasonable" measures to protect her privacy, and that of her students/employer by not naming names and speaking very generally.
From a hypothetical situation, what if the only way the students were able to tie the blog to her was through recognition of a similar story. She has this blog. She rants generally about her students. And she also journals about this whacked experience she had at the grocery store involving a jug of milk, frozen peas, and shoe polish. The kids recognize the shoe polish story and, bingo, she's outed.
I think this hypothetical scenario illustrates my point: she took reasonable measures to anonymize her persona; is she still (legally) culpable? Morally, it changes nothing, but I'm interested in your thoughts from the school board's position??