The Personal Information Rule

I don't know about how so much about how it has historically been, although I suspect that there are probably various examples of people who have found things on other web sites and not got punished for it or got minor slaps. Indeed, in this thread, Garamet and others talk about how people have used personal information of theirs gleaned from non-WF locations against them.

However, it seems at the moment the de facto operator of the board believes that things found out from elsewhere on the Internet is and should be fair game.

I get that from Tamar's responses in this thread, specifically posts #32 and #34.

I also get this from her starting a thread asking whether there in fact SHOULD be a personal information policy at all.

http://www.wordforge.net/showthread.php?t=96933

Now it could be that she just was asking as an academic question, or some sort of a troll. I take it that she legitimately thinks it may not be necessary to have a personal information rule, or that there might be enough members here who think that.

I get that from her responses, or lack thereof, to my questions posed up thread about whether personal information gained off WF should be used. She seems to make a distinction between information that could be found through, say, Googling, and information that would require more extensive effort to find.

Tamar's attitude seems to be, "Anything is public that can be found elsewhere on the Internet and we can't really do anything to stop people from looking there so we should not really legislate against that."

Again, if I'm misstating what her position is, I apologize in advance and she can correct me. But this seems fairly clear to me.

FWIW, I've "known" you a while, and I do think fundamentally you are fair.

Others don't share that opinion.

You may just want a fig leaf for what you ultimately want to do, whatever that is.

You may have not thought that people would be opposed to some sort of limitation on personal information gleaned from outside of WF (and apparently, at least some posters seem to believe that there should not be such a limitation) or that those posters would be a minority in the grand scheme of things.

Who knows?

But if you tell me, "No, the WF policy isn't and won't be everything's fair game if you find it on the Internet outside the Blue Room and PMs" I'd be happy.

Is it?

Did you read my first draft?

My opinion is just that. I will not run this board on just my opinion...and even my opinion is not a complete free-for all.

I made that thread after someone...I think it was Ancalagon said "chuck it" about the PI rule. I thought it would be interesting to see how the votes would fall. I would have been shocked if getting rid of it won.

If I was on the power trip some think I am, I wouldn't ask anyone a damn thing, I'd just do what I want. But I think it's important to include community input. There is no way I will ever be able to make everyone happy, but working together I think we can make improvements and create something fair and workable that still keeps our unique culture intact.

Asking questions, even extreme ones, gets the discussion going and that's a good thing in my view.

Unnecessarily complicated.

Just no pictures of other members in your avatar, anywhere. It's hinky and confusing. Besides, NO ONE has 100% of their posts in the Red Room so the odds are anyone who does it would be running afoul of that anyway.

If someone must troll someone with a picture they can do it in a Red Room Thread.

As for BBS'...no one should be making posts on a public BBS they don't expect the world to see and disseminate. I see no need to pick a handful when we can just disallow any personal information from such posts from being posted here but do allow other stuff from any BBS.

I'm mostly interested in your answer to what is fair game or not.

If posters are allowed to seek out and post personal information gleaned from places like Facebook and Linked In and troll people with it without ramification because it's on the Internet, I really want to know.

This doesn't really work if the intention is to prevent avatar trolling. Older posts will still be sitting there in MC, Green, etc.

I'm afraid any rule that allows trolling with some parts of personal information, and outlaws it for other kinds, is just an invitation for rule lawyering and/or a challenge to google-fu. Perhaps we should reconsider the original intent of the privacy rules we've had in the past.

I think that would go something like this:

Any trolling aimed at creating RL problems, rather than WF nuisance, for other users is outlawed.

Personal information is not going to be fair game...which you would know if you had read my "first draft".

Packard nails it. Messing around on Wordforge is not the same thing as messing around in real life. That's the only distinction that needs to be drawn.

It doesn't do that.

Personal information isn't allowed to be used unless the poster gives permission or posted it anywhere but the Blue Room.

Personal Information from other sites isn't allowed either. But Internet handles that are not unrevealed real names and BBS posts that don't contain personal information aren't considered personal information.

No using other posters pictures in avatars or signatures. Period.

The rule outlines what is and isn't PI.

I would think it would be harder to lawyerball this to death.

And what exactly is messing around in real life?

Fuckin?

Do we need another batch of "real life trolling" posts?

FWIW, I wouldn't even have tried to bitch about that.

If you mean people calling people's jobs and stuff like that...it's unlikely we'd even know about it until it happened and finding out who would be a problem.

Do you want punishment for idle threats in the Red Room?

"Messing around" can mean a lot of things and when making rules we need to be clear.

True, but we can't protect against that right now either, for the very same reasons.

No. What I don't like -- and pretty much the only fixable thing I don't like about using personal information on WF -- are attempts to connect someone's real life identity to stuff like pedophilia on Wordforge, trolling one person by trolling their non-WF family or loved ones, that kind of thing. I couldn't care less if someone wants to make fun of me here for any RL stuff they find out about me, as long as it doesn't reflect back on RL.

Yes, but clear is not the same as detailed. Detailed is the path that leads to loopholes, especially considering that the identifiability of personal information keeps changing with each innovation to digital media. For instance, we're all leaving lingual fingerprints all over Wordforge all the time, not just in the BR. Once we all get access to the software to track language idiosyncrasy the way facebook now tracks faces for us -- and that can't be far off --, does all personal information on everyone that has ever posted on WF become fair game?

There's a very easy litmus test for loopholes.

If you think Faceman can find a way to do an end-run around it, it's a loophole.

Seriously. Long before he passed the Bar, the guy was - and remains - a master at pushing on the weak spots until he breaks through.

I'm going to post this again:

Note that relatives is considered private information. I also added PMs and e-mail.

I don't think this idea so far is anywhere near a free-for-all.

Too vague as to "aimed at creating RL problems" and doesn't get at behavior which (I think) people wish to block.

For instance, I don't think saying Paladin's name is "Fred" really could be construed as an attempt to cause Paladin problems in real life. But I would hope that most of us would not want that to be done.

Sorry. Every so often I do work and/or miss things people post.

As written, this deals with information that the user him/herself posts only. It also doesn't deal with personal information that is gleaned from non-Web sources, things that one's employer or friends might post about a WF user, etc.

What I would suggest is more along the lines of:

"The Wordforge staff and members take privacy seriously. Personal information about a Wordforge user is generally considered to be private and protected information. Discussing the personal information of another Wordforge user in a public area of Wordforge is strictly prohibited with the following exceptions:
1. the user has given explicit permission for the personal information to be discussed
2. the user has given implicit permission for the personal information to be discussed by posting about it at Wordforge in a non-Blue Room public forum
3. the discussion of the personal information takes place in the context of a Blue Room thread.

Lowercase "i" in information and "is not limited to" would be my suggestions. "Is not limited to" says clearly that there are other things that would constitute personal information, whereas "may not be limited to" means "this could be the entire list of what is personal information, it could not."

Anything posted in the Blue Room, in private messages or e-mail is defined as personal information? I don't have a problem with it as such, but it does strike me as one of these things is not like the other...

Do you mean the contents of e-mail/PMs or e-mail addresses?

I would personally prefer not defining anything as "not personal information."

If garamet's e-mail address is margaretprobe@compuserv.com, for example, that would seem to me to be an "Internet handle" and yet a real name shared on WF.

I'd rephrase this slightly:

"Using other posters' photographs as avatars or signatures is prohibited. It is rude. It can be confusing to other users who is posting. It also can constitute trolling, as the avatars and signatures would not be confined only to those forums like the Red Room where trolling is permitted."

I would delete this last paragraph.

PMs should remain private unless both parties consent to posting it publicly. If a threat or harrassment is made, it can be forwarded to a mod for any required action.

Which is pretty much what we're doing now.

Seems like Wordforge keeps trying to reinvent the wheel.

Why shouldn't handles on other websites be included since they can be used to track down RL info?

The one obvious problem with that is if someone like you decides to once again go sending RL info on other posters to other posters here via PM then dirt bags like you should be punished as you're obviously intending to break the spirit of the rule. We all know what you did to Chup even if you're a lying sack of dog shit who won't own up to your own dirt baggery.

I think that's what you're trying to prevent and it won't work. It will be web lawyered to death. Every rule is.

Keep it simple and trust the staff to make common sense decisions. The key word is trust. If the membership trusts the staff, you don't need these kind of specifics.

Which is why there is no need to change anything.

Go fuck yourself. Chup posted his own initials. He's got no one to blame but himself.

Just for the sake of possibly adding a new dimension to this discussion, information need not necessarily be private to be personal. The two words seem to have acquired a functional interchangeability that might not necessarily be productive. The idea is that, as a community, we might share things among ourselves that we wouldn't share with other people. Abusing that sense of community can't be good for the community.

I don't know if "personal but not private" needs to necessarily complicate the rules -- it might not even need to be mentioned in the rules. Maybe it's just something we could all bear in mind.

A good example is Tamar's medical situation. It's not private; we all know about it. But it's personal to Tamar, and although she might not let anyone know it, it probably is genuinely hurtful on a real and personal level. Besides that, it seems to me like trolling her with it lacks class or creativity.

I think it's time some things are spelled out, not only for the membership, but
for the staff. There are so many conflicting precedents, ways to get away with
plenty of crap due to vagueness and misunderstandings.

It will be much more clear what is and is not a violation, new people will know
what not to do right away without wondering.

Ultimately, anything questionable will still be the common sense of the staff as well as what punishment if any is appropriate.

The problem is not, nor has it be in the four years I've been here, personal information. The problem is people who use that information to ridicule or anger the owner of that information.

The membership would trust the staff if the staff made common sense decisions to put a stop to that sort of thing.

It only takes a little bit of common sense to know when someone is teasing (example: when Evenflow posted a picture of Sokar - despite Sokar taking it seriously) and when someone is intentionally trying to harm (in whatever form) another.

If you stuck with that rule, there wouldn't need to be any rules about where or when information was gotten.

The tweaking thus far:

There's going to have to be some discretion on figuring out what and isn't trolling, or what is and isn't creepy or over the line.

We all know so many random things about each other that they're bound to come up in little ways in conversation. TKO is a twentysomething science type. Dayton is a teacher. I work at a university. Bunnie and Zedword are a couple. Apostle is a business owner. Plenty of people's occupations are known, be they a farmer, TV photographer, nurse or Star Trek author. And for the most part, I have no idea whether I know these things because of the Red Room, Green Room or Blue Room.

Stuff that comes from a basic familiarity with each other and isn't malicious in any way has to be different from deliberate trolling.

Perhaps we could have ... arbitration or tribunal - a jury of peers to determine if the 'defendant' is trolling or being creepy; or if the 'prosecution' is being overly defensive.

Those who were here at the time readily agree that Ted was being creepy. and most agree that Evenflow was not trolling, that Sokar was being overly defensive.

The problem wouldn't be "is it fair" the problem would be finding 6 or 8 members who are impartial.