As part of the developing online conversation about press intrusion into social networks in the wake of the Virginia Tech murders more evidence is coming to light of our sometimes paradoxical attitudes to online publishing.

In a wide ranging and thoughtful post Guardian blogs editor and former PodsandBlogs'er Kevin Anderson writes

Last autumn, Guardian journalists asked me to find people struggling with alcoholism who were blogging. It wasn’t easy in the UK, but I found a couple of blogs including one person who wrote eloquently about his struggles with alcohol. We linked to his blog. He called us after seeing Guardian URLs in his trackbacks. He was furious and said we had no right to link to his blog, even though it was public. In retrospect, I probably should have contacted him considering the sensitivity of this issue, but -not only as a journalist, but also as a long-time internet user - I had difficulty understanding his outrage over a perceived transgression of privacy when he had written his thoughts on one of the least private of spaces: a blog.

And in a very perceptive round-up Martin Stabe who we spoke with last night points to an earlier example of MySpace users objecting to press intrusion into their community. Martin's summary of the issues raised by that and other cases is worth repeating:

Lower-profile bloggers, like the students in both cases, tend to think of their use of these technologies as a semi-private conversation among their friends, often forgetting that they are actually putting private material into the public domain. Is this a matter of educating journalists about the changing meaning of ‘public’ and ‘private’ online, or a matter of educating the wider public that everything online is in the public domain and therefore fair game?

This is just the same question Robin Hamman raises on the BBC Manchester blog. This thought provoking post attracted some great comments. But I found Julia's answer helpful in coalescing some vague ideas of my own

...the web is a massive publishing tool. Like publishing, it's not private, unless the user makes it such. And it's the user, to begin with, who has to make such decision. With journalists using a potentially private content, a lot will have to do with the angle they take on developing a news story. But if you publish any content on the web, you've got to be aware that it can become public.... Finally, let's not forget about search engines syndication. Any "private" blog is already in search engines and can end up in anyone's browser

Julia's comments echo a quote from Danny O'Brien posted here by the BBC's Alan Connor:

"they're talking in the private register of blogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google."

Indeed Journalists are not the only people trawling our stuff. When we post to MySpace, or Livejournal or Flickr everyone from future girlfriends to prospective employers may well be taking a look too

As Julia points out your content is not controlled by how you want it to be used. Google images, to take one example, doesn't know that your familiy snaps are meant for close friends only. Societal clues that content is "not intended for public consumption", mean very little to search engines, only code can truly enforce privacy. Google doesn't know what your intentions were when you published to the web.

Yet we are often blind to just how little privacy we can expect to have online. Our expectations of privacy and community are adapted to real life not virtual life. The Virginia Tech controversy is just one aspect of the troubles we face as our data trails lengthen like evening shadows. I remember months ago in a Pods and Blogs interview the President of the British Computing Society Nigel Shadbolt warned of a time when everything we did could be recorded on a chip the size of a sugar cube. Shadbolt agued that we needed new online tools to help preserve our existing notions of privacy and community: content that disappeared after a period of time, and data that included the ability to "self-destruct"

We do, as Robin put it, often feel the virtual community we live in is like the pub, and we imagine our conversations are, like the pub, lost in the morning fug. But technology is outpacing our expectations. Inspired by a talk with anthropologist Charles Armstrong of Tramponline Systems, I wrote about this while we were in the throws of the blogger code controversy, before the horrible events at Virginia Tech:

many of the problems we experience start because people forget that writing online is an act of publishing. It is easy from within an online community, to view that community as a virtual island, and that what we say will be shared only among its members. But this clearly isn't the case, the waters of the web visit all shores. When we blog, podcast or post to Twitter or MySpace, we are, in effect, publishing to an audience that extends beyond our PC, and is potentially as large as the web itself.

• Bookmark with:
• del.icio.us |
• Digg |
• Newsvine |
• NowPublic |
• Reddit
• - What's this?