PC Training & Consulting Weblog

Blogs vs Expectations of Privacy

December 19, 2004

Your Blog or Mine? By JEFFREY ROSEN

As Web logs proliferate -- Technorati, which tracks 5 million blogs, estimates that 15,000 are added each day -- the boundaries between public and private are being transformed. Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.

In 1890, when Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice, and Samuel Warren, his former law partner, wrote their famous article on the right to privacy, they worried that the press and the camera were threatening the privacy of daily life. In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them. ...

As personal blogging proliferates, an etiquette is beginning to emerge. In a forthcoming study of nearly 500 bloggers and their expectations of privacy by Fernanda Viegas of M.I.T., more than a third of the respondents said they had ''gotten in trouble'' for material posted on their blog, and a third knew other bloggers who had gotten into trouble with family and friends. Those who wrote frequently about ''highly personal materials'' got into trouble most often of all. ...

There are two obvious differences between bloggers and the traditional press: unlike bloggers, professional journalists have a) editors and b) the need to maintain a professional reputation so that sources will continue to talk to them. ...

Like other journalists, bloggers can be sued for disclosing true details of someone else's private life, as long as the disclosures ''would be highly offensive to a reasonable person'' and ''not of legitimate concern to the public.''