Sunday, September 25, 2005
Confidentiality and Blogging
Mark Rittman posted some interesting thoughts on confidentiality and blogging today. Tom Kyte picked up on them as well. Don Burleson has posted a number of links regarding hypothetical legal issues as well. Anyway Mark asked for thoughts from other bloggers, and partly by way of making a point, I thought I'd comment here.
I happen to think, and am as confident as an educated layman can be that the legal position will be somewhere around the same place as well, that common sense and the concept of duty of care will go a long way here.
I'm commenting on Mark's blog - I haven't notified him or asked permission to do so. This is because, it seems to me, that by posting opinion in the public domain it is fair to comment upon it.
Having looked through my blog history it occurs to me that there is almost nothing there that reflects upon my work, this is because of a duty of care (and arguably a contract of employment). Equally there are emails I have received that I have not commented upon. Same thing goes, private conversation isn't public knowledge. I'm not a consultant - but it seems to me that the consultant/client relationship is equally a private one. I'd not expect to see client problems shown on a blog, except where they illustrate a general point ("a client of mine had this slow batch job, turns out it committed every 100 rows to save rollback space").
So far, so straightforward. If it is in the public domain - its fair game, you may or may not converse with the author beforehand some I would others aren't worth the hassle, but commentary is fair. If it is private or you have a duty of care then don't publish without generalizing.
There are a couple of other issues that do come up from time to time. The first is what to do when you mess up. I personally leave the mess up in place (unless I spot it as I post - doh!) and post an update, probably elsewhere, or an acknowledgement in the comments. Others publicly correct the original, which is OK but sometimes the original error is education itself, and yet others silently correct the article, this last I find really annoying because although the article gets corrected the publisher has no control over where it has been replicated to and commented upon.
The second (its an american constitution thing I think) is whether bloggers are Journalists or not. For me, we aren't (except rarely), journalism is (in my book) a valuable and important profession holding authority to account and explaining the world. Blogging is op-ed. Valuable and important, not Journalism. I respect the BBC,the Telegraph, the Economist etc not for the opinion (though I wish I could write that well) but for the real journalism that makes up the bulk of the output.
I happen to think, and am as confident as an educated layman can be that the legal position will be somewhere around the same place as well, that common sense and the concept of duty of care will go a long way here.
I'm commenting on Mark's blog - I haven't notified him or asked permission to do so. This is because, it seems to me, that by posting opinion in the public domain it is fair to comment upon it.
Having looked through my blog history it occurs to me that there is almost nothing there that reflects upon my work, this is because of a duty of care (and arguably a contract of employment). Equally there are emails I have received that I have not commented upon. Same thing goes, private conversation isn't public knowledge. I'm not a consultant - but it seems to me that the consultant/client relationship is equally a private one. I'd not expect to see client problems shown on a blog, except where they illustrate a general point ("a client of mine had this slow batch job, turns out it committed every 100 rows to save rollback space").
So far, so straightforward. If it is in the public domain - its fair game, you may or may not converse with the author beforehand some I would others aren't worth the hassle, but commentary is fair. If it is private or you have a duty of care then don't publish without generalizing.
There are a couple of other issues that do come up from time to time. The first is what to do when you mess up. I personally leave the mess up in place (unless I spot it as I post - doh!) and post an update, probably elsewhere, or an acknowledgement in the comments. Others publicly correct the original, which is OK but sometimes the original error is education itself, and yet others silently correct the article, this last I find really annoying because although the article gets corrected the publisher has no control over where it has been replicated to and commented upon.
The second (its an american constitution thing I think) is whether bloggers are Journalists or not. For me, we aren't (except rarely), journalism is (in my book) a valuable and important profession holding authority to account and explaining the world. Blogging is op-ed. Valuable and important, not Journalism. I respect the BBC,the Telegraph, the Economist etc not for the opinion (though I wish I could write that well) but for the real journalism that makes up the bulk of the output.
