Legal and Ethical Concerns Raised by Posting Replies to Sex Ad
"Internet vigilantes have engaged spammers and scam artists and posted results of their conversations online. Others expose sexual predators they purposely seek out in chat rooms.
In this case, however, the men who replied to Fortuny's posting did not appear to be doing anything illegal, so the outing has no social value other than to prove that someone could ruin lives online, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Oxford and Harvard universities."
NWSource.com (read more)
posted by 3 Blind Mice @ 7:19 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I fail to see how you can make a valid case for an invasion of privacy argument. These people were not directly solicited to reply (in that his post was aimed at the entire craigslist userbase rather than seeking out specific individuals) and they thus replied wholly of their own volition. They had no idea who they were replying to; it could have been anyone, including a 10 year old - which would have placed them in violation of paedophile laws. It is tantamount to you stopping someone on the street and handing them a million dollars, then calling them a thief when they walk off without giving it back, even though there were no defined terms on whether they needed to give the money back at all. When you are sending out naked pictures of yourself to complete strangers over the internet, that isn't "private".
[quote="fron your blog"]the outing has no social value other than to prove that someone could ruin lives online, said Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Oxford and Harvard universities."[/quote]
This presupposes that everything someone does must have social value, which is utter BS. Freedom in and of itself is about doing things just because you want to and not because it has social value. Most of the things that people do everyday such as going to the beach, eating at McDonalds or watching t.v. have no social value either, however that has no bearing on whether or not people should be prohibited from doing so.
I find your blog posts rather hypocritical. You try to base your case around ad homonym attacks (calling it "uncreative" and "bland") and then do exactly what you are complaining about him doing (releasing people's personal information – even though you said yourself that it is only "possibly" his information). You make no real arguments and your quotes from EFF are pretty irrelevant. You cannot call facts "private" when you're freely sending them out to random strangers, and you have no basis for "intrusion into seclusion" as he didn't intrude, they freely gave up the information.
Where were you when Paris Hilton's sex tape was released and Jude Law's penis ended up on every desktop in the nation? Call me up when you're ready to really start tackling the issue of privacy from the core. Maybe we could head out on a road trip... I vote that we start in Washington and leave strongly worded letters on the desks of every elected official, then we can work our way through the advertising companies that buy and sell our information to anybody willing to pay the right price, or the calling centres that ring me up at 11 p.m. to tell me how I can save 10 cents on my long distance bill, and then maybe we can googlestalk the CEO's of all of the major news media outlets and ask them to stop revealing personal information that they dig up about those poor, unfortunate sleaze balls I keep seeing splashed on every newspaper, tv station and magazine. Oh wait...
see also: http://www.craigslist-perverts.org/
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