Privacy and Blogging
Joyce Park suggests that privacy on blogs is something developers need to work on next. She shares examples of different levels of privacy within blogging and considers that bloggers may not necessarily want everything they put online to be fully accessible by others. "Stepping back from things as they currently are, it should be clear that fully public speech is not the only imaginable or even the optimal level of privacy necessary on the Internet," she opines. She discusses anonymous blogging as a way to get some privacy, but she also mentions numerous anonymous bloggers who have been outed, some of whom had to stop blogging once their identity became known.
Joyce seems to focus on recreational blogs hosted on public systems. When a number of us began blogging, we dealt with issues of privacy. There’s a running question/joke in the blogosphere about what happens when a mom finds her child’s blog. I often wonder why some bloggers post things on public blogs they don’t necessarily want someone else to see, whether it’s an employer, a friend, a client, or a family member. It’s important to be responsible about those things, have tact, and think ahead.
In certain business environments, privacy in a blog system could be imperative. If competing newsrooms with joint operating agreements use blogs for knowledge management and sharing, having privacy features could enable them to more fully share and log information via that system without fearing their competition will find it. Some of those competing newsrooms share a library. On a platform with privacy features, the library could have one blog but change the permissions on different posts to specify or block access for certain journalists or groups. These functions could also work well in research labs and sales environments where employees compete against each other.
Privacy issues is another reason why it’s important to know who’s reading a blog. Right now, knowing readers is tricky because it’s difficult to know who’s visiting the blog and receiving the feed. Through services like Technorati and Share Your OPML and features like comments and trackback, it’s possible to get a rough idea about visitors and readers. Some efforts to learn more are hampered by a lack of or no or limited acccess to site statistics.
Another issue of privacy when blogging is preventing people from seeing draft posts.
Thanks for sharing, Christina!
I should mention Joyce’s post about getting fired from Friendster for blogging.