Blogging & Tweeting Without Getting Sued by Pearson Mark

Author:Pearson, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAW000000
ISBN: 9781742697109
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2012-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Sometimes, though, this stored data keeps killers off the streets. Messages to his mistress on a service called Kakao Talk were the undoing of a Korean computing professor who had strangled his wife and tried to dump her body in the Nakdong River.44 He had even visited the social networking company’s offices to get them to delete crucial text messages he had sent his mistress, but that data, combined with surveillance camera footage, formed the basis of the prosecution’s murder case against him.

Of course, basic password selection and management is a fundamental starting point we often overlook. As the computer experts advise, choose your passwords carefully and change them often. Laptops and smartphones also have geolocation capability, meaning your very movements can be recorded and abused. This has serious implications for any meetings or communications you might have with confidential sources for your blog, an issue we examine more closely in the next chapter.

As the Pew Research Center reported in 2011, more than half of all people online had uploaded photos to be shared with others.45 Now that facial recognition (‘tagging’) is increasingly combined with geolocation capabilities, we are leaving digital footprints via our images. That seems fine when you are just sharing an image with your small circle of friends on Facebook, but depending on your privacy settings, these photos might well be viewable to the outside world—and even if you have deliberately limited access to people within your immediate network, your ‘friends’ might choose to download and forward your photographs.

Do others have the right to use your images in their postings? And do you have the right to use their images? As far as privacy goes, the courts have given us very little guidance on this to date. (Intellectual property is a separate issue, and we’ll look at it in Chapter 8.) If someone has their privacy settings on maximum restriction, or just emails a revealing image to a small circle of people, then re-sending or posting that image might be classified as a breach of confidence or the disclosure of embarrassing private facts. Hacking into someone’s account to bypass their privacy settings can be a simple—but illegal—process, as a security expert learned when he demonstrated the procedure at an Australian conference and a journalist was detained and questioned after reporting on the technique.46 In 2011, the US state of Tennessee passed a law making it an offence for anyone to post an image that causes ‘emotional distress’ to someone else, although its constitutionality has been questioned.47

Our decisions about whether to publish the images of others are not yet legal ones under the privacy laws of many countries. Instead they fall within the realm of moral or ethical judgments, and we all know how murky that area can be with so many different cultural, religious and ideological factors at play. Prevention is better than cure. The simplest approach is to avoid ever emailing or posting an image on the Internet if you would be unhappy for that same image to appear on that night’s network news with your name attached to it.

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