The Personal Information Rule

Krieg likes Tots with Franks Red Hot sauce when he watches the Packers getting their shit pushed in by the Giants.

Why do we need a privacy rule? Because of a few knuckleheads that range from ugly (what that thread devolved into) to just plain old creepy.

If you want to maintain WF's familial atmosphere even while bringing in new blood, you're going to have to have a privacy rule. I admit that it's my opinion, but any new member that sees people running fast and loose with private information isn't going to be inclined to share any information. If they're not going to share, why join at all?

Reasonable people can disagree about what should be covered by the privacy rule, but to not have one at all? I imagine the vast majority of the membership, including myself, would log out permanently. The only people that would stay are the people that want to play with private information.

True.

I rather think this is a pretty good, sensible take. I crossed out the clause I think is too much.

Of course, I still think it's silly to pretend that Google is private and that people won't still be looking shit up and sharing it if they want to, except you just won't know who is doing it unless they post it at TK or a similar board.

I've only read up to post #40 and I'll add more later, but one of the things I wanted to bring up was the fact that "personal information" on an internet forum is, by and large, an oxymoron.

If it is out on the internet, then it's not considered personal by nature. Only nowadays, we are dealing with an ever thinning line of work life, social life, and online life. Some people are having a tough time adjusting, while others have no boundaries between these whatsoever.

Also, if some 'tard sent me a troll, flame, or death threat by PM, I feel I should have a right to post it for everyone to have a good laugh at. Just because they want to hide behind an inbox, it doesn't mean anyone has agreed to keep it private.

Who the fuck is Akuma?

Maybe some in between compromise??

No posting PMs or Emails...unless they are sent to harass, troll or threaten, in which case you are free to post them. Be certain, however, because if they don't contain any of the above, it will be deleted and you will be warned or banned depending on how badly you've breached someone's privacy.

Of course it's easier just to leave PMs private. They really are a function where people expect privacy and deserve it as it's not a publically accessable medium.

I realize that and agree. My point was more about ordering/organization. It doesn't make sense IMO to lead with all caps with the broad rule and no apparent exceptions when we know that there are important exceptions.

Yeah, I largely just edited/reordered what you had.

Since the policy is that divulging something in the past is an absolute defense to penalties, it doesn't strike me as something needing any grandfathering. Either something was made public before or it wasn't. If it was, there presumably is a link. I suppose the one area where there may be trouble here is that the entire board history is not necessarily archived perfectly. If I say, "Paladin said his name was Fred back in 2005 (or whenever it was that this place started), but gosh, I can't find the link," I suppose that is a bridge to be crossed if/when we come to it.

Fair enough. Something like "The administration will investigate any allegations of abuse of personal information, so long as they are alleged to have occurred after this policy has been implemented."

I don't know if that is the route I would personally recommend.

The first issue is that honestly statutes of limitations exist for a reason. That reason is that it gets increasingly hard to defend or prosecute a case as it gets older. In this context, it may not be as tough because one should be able to provide a link to the allegedly abusive statement, and if there's a defense, one should be able to provide a link to where the person disclosed the personal information.

The second issue, as I originally said, is read with the next part of the proposed policy, there's somewhat of a disconnect. The proposed policy goes from "There's no statute of limitations whatsoever" to "If you don't immediately report an abuse of information, you run into a statute of limitations."

Don't know if I agree philosophically about that. But regardless, what I would then might suggest would be something along the following lines:

"A member may defend himself from an accusation of abusing personal information by showing that the member whose personal information was revealed knew or should have known about the revealing of his personal information and yet failed to formally report it to the WordForge administration or otherwise object to it within a reasonable time frame."

The notion of "reasonable" would allow case-by-case discretion. As you implied, depending on the nature of the information, how frequently people post, etc., it might be reasonable to respond shortly after the information is posted versus if I reveal Async's personal information today, he will not have the ability to complain about it for months.

I disagree with the notion that silence equals consent in general, but certainly here. Silence could equal ignorance of what to do to report, fear of retaliation, embarrassment, any number of things.

It's too late to stop the information from spreading, perhaps. But it's not too late to punish someone.

Launching such an investigation need not rest on the involvement of the person whose personal information was allegedly revealed. Which is how I read your original proposed policy.

I do not expect that there is such a large group of people who might make such knowingly false claims that it would be worth legislating against. In particular that is because it would likely be obvious when a claim is false. I can't put words in another poster's mouth. So when I link to the alleged statement that they made about me or another poster revealing personal information, there has to be some there there.

The trouble with that philosophy is that there are various things that are about the Internet about each of us (or at least, some of us) that we did not voluntarily put there and have no control over. I can have my privacy settings on the highest level on Facebook or wherever, but there are likely going to be friends or even friends of friends who will post pictures of me, say things about me, reveal information about me. Is all that fair game for trolling purposes? If my employer or clubs I belong to post information about me, is that fair game?

I think the line is best drawn at "information one divulges on WF in non-Blue Room areas," because those are things that one has consented to be out there.

From what I understood, the current policy included penalizing for initials. I would personally say that certain uses of initials or similar references should not be OK, as they carry with them an implicit threat "I know who you are and I might reveal it to people." Same with deliberately leaving clues as to people's real life identity.

I don't know or care to know details ofwhat Muad and Sokar are up to or why. In general, I would say that the use of the initials would have to be much more direct and pointed to trigger penalties than "I've got a picture of a random person and that is because Poster X has the same initials as that person, ha ha."

If the policy had the sort of "Making frivolous accusations of abusing personal information may also incur penalties" component that Paladin suggested, that could (hopefully) nip much of that problem in the bud.

No one is pretending any such thing. Obviously, people can look up whatever they want to and there's only limited ability to stop or even punish people after the fact.

But the rules won't stop someone who wants to from hiring private detectives named Sam Google and George Yahoo to track down a given poster, but they will (presumably) punish someone who does hire them and uses the information that they get to attack the poster.

In much the same way, I think the rules should punish someone who uses Google or Yahoo to seek for public information on the Internet to troll someone on WF, even though they cannot stop someone from doing so.

I would still like to see at least an effort made to separate what we do here from what's in the past - specifically things that aren't in this board's past. This isn't TrekBBS circa 2003, or SD.net. This is Wordforge. It should be treated as its own thing.

Like TKO and Tamar said, if it's out there...it's out there. I think someone was able to find out my RL name some years ago from a book review I posted on Amazon under "annayolei" back when I didn't know how to remove my RL name. Granted, my name is not unique and no harm came of the incident, but it serves as a reminder that nothing's private on line.

So I say: if it's something you don't want people to know, do not post it at all, anywhere.

That's not to say those that want to play with people's PI aren't dicks at worst and immature children at best, however. But you can only control and police yourself. And isn't that what WF is supposed to be about?

While I agree that "if it's out there, it's out there," there's no reasonable way for us to police that.

I think the simplest rule possible for us would be "if it wasn't made public here, don't post it here."

Fair enough. Let's work on that.

Yes. The "grandfathering" just acknowledges that we can't put a genie back in the bottle. If something exists on our board RIGHT NOW and it hasn't been excised, then it should not be used to hold someone to account going forward.

Yeah.

The burden is on the person who wants to use the information to prove that it ISN'T private. If you're not sure, don't use it.

There is NO limitation on the timeframe (after initiation of the new rules) for which the transgressor can be penalized. HOWEVER, there should be a limit on how long the "victim" can be aware of it without reporting it.

Suppose you find out my name is Fred and start calling me Fred and I don't object/report. After a while 20 people are calling me Fred. Should I be able to suddenly demand that 20 people get penalized? I don't think so.

Sure, that would be a defense. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the accused needn't raise it unless the staff fails to uncover that fact.

Exactly, which is why a fixed time is no good. It's enough to say that the "victim" should report the release at the earliest opportunity.

Someone's gotta complain before the cops will come. If you knew about for six months and THEN complain, yes, we'll probably fix it. But am I going to hand out warnings or bans at that point? Not likely. Because of the victim's inaction, the information is essentially fully disseminated.

Am I going to ban everyone who called me Fred? Everyone who quoted a post that called me Fred? If the "victim" doesn't care enough to press for his own protection, I see no reason why the protection should be extended that far.

It also eliminates the possibility of someone manufacturing a charge (or building a defense to one) because formerly public information has been lost/deleted/etc. from the board.

Unless it is fairly obvious (or someone associated with the "victim" realizes and reports it), the staff does not (and really cannot) know what information is private or not.

If you call me Fred in a thread and I don't report it, why WOULDN'T the staff figure that it was public information?

It takes our time to research these things, it really does. Since many of us are doing this in addition to our regular jobs, it can really become an excess burden, even if only once in a while.

I think of this kinda like airport security. Yes, you're perfectly free to talk about bombs in the airport, but you shouldn't since you KNOW the authorities MUST take such talk seriously.

Well, an obvious false claim is just screwing around. Find humor somewhere else and don't tie up the bandwidth. Really.

Sure. And no consequences will befall those who had good intentions. No one's saying you have to be right, just that you had to believe a personal information release might've been happening.

In general, I like "if it wasn't made public here, don't post it here." Or how about just "Don't be creepy"?

Some people have never made any secret of their identities. If somebody ribs garamet with a crack about Probe -- or even makes a random comment like "hey, just picked up Strangers from the Sky, can't wait to read it" -- that springs pretty naturally from on-board stuff.

On the other hand, some people have made a habit of trolling her using her significant other's name. That's something that could be pretty easily gleaned from her website, but since he doesn't post here, it's getting into "dragging family members into it" territory, which rubs me the wrong way.

Obviously everyone's going to refer to Dayton by his real first name, since it's also his username. Under the current rules, I could go find his 10 most-likely-to-spark-controversy posts, then create a thread with links to all of them, using his full name repeatedly for maximum SEO value in the hopes of pushing it to the top of search results and affecting his real life. It would be a complete asshole move, but it would be within the rules. Should it be?

If Dayton at some point said "I want to put the genie back in the bottle and 'reclassify' my last name," should he be able to? Personally, I'd like for there to be a way for him to do that.

Those are some gray areas. What I think is much more black-and-white is anything you have to use Google to get. If you take clues that were dropped in the Red Room and use Google to figure out somebody's real name ... yeah, OK, technically it's all public information, but it's pretty fucking creepy.

Ditto anything that was posted in a private WF Facebook group but not on the board.

TrekBBS, WF and a couple of other spinoff boards have always been a part of our history. TrekBBS circa 2003 is part of us, the events that led to our beginning. Of course we should be able to talk about it.

It seems people want to have no personal responsibility. We are to be Nannies protecting people from the consequences of what they might have done...even under internet handles be it yesterday or a decade ago.

I think there are two issues here. The first would be the original leaker of personal information. To me, he should still be subject to punishment, regardless of how much time has passed and regardless of how slow the poster might have been to accuse the original leaker. At least, if the policy is that there is to be no statute of limitations.

The second issue would be the people who spread the personal information after the initial leak. For my money, they would inherently be able to defend themselves by saying, "Look at all these times Paladin got called Fred. I just assumed that Paladin had made that public himself." And if the facts showed it was reasonable for them to have made that assumption, then the staff should not penalize them IMO.

To use the analogy of cops, police still will investigate even if the victim delays reporting a crime (as long as the crime is within the statute of limitations). It doesn't matter that you knew, or should have known, about the theft, the domestic battery, the sexual assault or whatever crime you are reporting. It doesn't matter that the damage from the crime is less easily undone at a later point, or could not be undone, or has in fact increased because the victim has taken longer than ideal to report it.

All that matters is that a crime has occurred and there is sufficient evidence to point the finger at a given person and successfully prosecute him.

If all the people who are calling you "Fred" know damn well that you didn't consent to be calling "Fred," I don't see why they don't deserve to be punished.

To a certain extent, I suppose I rely on institutional memory/the Tamarchives here. I could not, for example, necessarily point to a specific page where I learned of Anna's true name. It may have been deleted. But I believe I remember it. I would expect that would be sufficient for a staff who may or may not remember it too.

The sort of public information we're talking about is fairly obvious, and what I was talking about was someone else realizing that public information was disclosed and reporting it.

We all take holidays from this place from time to time. It shouldn't be that someone gets closed out of reporting misconduct because they did so, or because they waited for what the staff thinks is too long to report the misconduct.

I respect and appreciate the time the staff takes in making this place what it is.

But trying to set up a troll that so-and-so released personal information is so pathetic that even Skrain Dukat says, "That's weak sauce."

I would imagine making a false report is punishable by some other aspect of WF rules.

Honestly, at this point I'd reverse it.

Public information posted in the Red Room is available for Trolling.

All other areas are not.

That's the rule on Trolling already.

If you inadverdently reveal something about yourself in the Workshop or in the Green Room, it shouldn't be open season.

And honestly, personal information such as pictures, places of employment, where you live, anything that could be construed as a threat itself should be off limits period. Fuck, I could probably find Forbin's house. Should he be penalized for that?

It in no way, shape or form makes this a better place to say 'I know where you live.'

That would make things a nightmare to keep track of.

Let's leave the rule as is because it is working fine and put the burden on you the poster.

What do I mean by burden?

I mean you the poster are going to have to use your fucking brains and be careful about what you post outside of the Blue Room.

And frankly you're fucking stupid if you're posting pictures or places of employment or where you live even if it is in the Blue Room....

Yes, the incredible burden of 'reported post by USERNAME' appearing in the shelter.

We already use the membership to bring things to mod's notice. Its no burden whatsoever.

Actually, its EASIER to enforce, because if you are looking to see if it is a viable use of the information, you only have to check one forum on the board.

Maybe its a generational thing, or maybe it is just that I am not a fucko, but I don't understand the paranoia.

What's the big deal about saying I live at 38th and Alaska?

I've already said where I work. Anyone who reads my blue room threads can go and find everything about me, I'm sure. I've checked it myself, tried to find myself on Google out of Blue Room info - got a name and college graduating class in no time flat. So nobody can assume that's safe either, it just won't be openly trolled with.

The easiest way to police it here is to leave it to things we post on the forum, but I think everyone should be aware that, given all the years we've posted together, it's probably easy to figure out where half the membership lives and works.

The big deal is you might have to kill a crazy.

I would think most posters would not want what is said and done here to affect them IRL.

Any one discrete piece of information, such as an approximate address, might not be in and of itself be enough for someone to impinge on someone's real life.

But add all the information people post about themselves, and it could easily pile up into creepy territory when they start to pull in information from outside WF.

Especially when you consider information is fungible. If I have gotten information about someone from the Blue Room and use it to get information about someone from outside WF, there would not necessarily be any way to show where I got my first "lead" from.

There's no particular reason to think that someone would necessarily want to compile that sort of information in most cases. I, at least, think that WF should discourage people from cyberstalking or other stalking by using information posted here to derive information from outside of here.

I have a tendency to keep my private information private. Nevertheless, just making some people aware of my RL name has been enough to make me a target.

I've been stalked IRL by someone at TBBS who got a kick out of posting about driving past certain landmarks in my town (population 100,000). Tamar has hinted at knowing my exact address (she happened to have garnered a former address from a less-than-accurate source that also included an address where a relative lived, but where I never had; she does not now, nor will she ever, know my current address - I do learn from these experiences). Photos/screen caps of me have been taken from other sites without my permission and Photoshopped into giggle fits for Face and Tamar and her posse. Flashlight, Jamey, and starkt have brightened their drab little lives by posting photos of my S.O. and making snide comments about his website in an attempt to troll me.

I've done what I can to protect my kids and grandkids from predators whose inability to hold their own in a discussion, or the perception that "this is the Red Room; you have to act a certain way," force them to play out these equivalents of obscene phone calls. It says more about them than about me.

I have no doubt that if I had an employer who might take umbrage at my opinions, Jamey at least would rat me out just for the hell of it. His reasons have nothing to do with WF, but they're an example of the kind of sociopathy that anonymity encourages in some posters.

Take away the basic rule of civility that a personal information rule requires and, while most of these cowards are just that, RL consequences would not be unexpected.

My RL stalking stories aren't anywhere near as scary. I've had Sokar PM me pics he found of me, and some other coward posted pics of me on TK. Then there was the time KIRK1ADM claimed he went to see a sketch show I worked on. But the fact that he wouldn't tell me what, where or when it was makes me think it was bullshit.

And I too have learned lessons as I've gone. My email address on WF is a dummy address, I don't publicize work I've done, have never joined the WF Facebook group and I have never and will never use my wife's name on here.

But if some bored loser with an axe to grind wants to stalk me IRL, they only have to ask a few people for the dirt. Such is life when the inmates by and large run the asylum.

Honestly, that is way too many words for something so simple.

Yeah, that was one of my first introductions to the joy of personal information - I mentioned where I work and one of the guys in TNZ said he was going to call my work and try to get me fired for posting on the clock. It wasn't an issue, as he didn't know my real name and I worked for a huge company, but it pissed me off that someone would use even a shred of information that way.

I did a little digging, found the guy had a link to a website for a pet cause of his, that website had his personal info on it, and tried calling him at home.

The phone was busy and the guy was posting in TNZ, so I realized he had dial up.

I posted in his thread to get off the phone, I wanted to call him and have a chat about the use of personal information, and he freaked.

Naturally this is the guy Lisa gave oversight of the briefing room to, a year later. He wasn't a mod, but he talked his way into access into the mod room, despite being a class A troll himself.

I'm considering reposting #84 in the introductions forum, and would encourage actormike, Demiurge, and anyone else with similar "Oh, HAHAHA, it's all in good fun!" stories to do so as well. Potential new members need as much information as possible.

Who was it?

I think simpler is better.

Something so long with section and subsection is not only a pain to enforce but tends to be a challenge to certain mindsets.

I assume personal information at other websites means real names, phone numbers, addresses, photos, ect and not user handles, regular posts or things of that nature?