Personal information on the internet
DARTH VADER | 06.10.2006 13:13 | Analysis | Technology | World
IF people put themselves in position in public spaces where photos can be taken of them to prove an untruth, they only have themselves to blame.
“Personal Information on the INTERNET”
Although there is potential for abuse by pornographers, fraudsters and the like, the internet is a very useful tool and contrary to some scaremongering, it is not a threat to privacy but a means of ordinary people to offer information about themselves by way of chat-rooms, blogs, photographs, and most users access the internet to shop or to send emails and to network. An email is a private correspondence written to someone else, similar to a letter. However an email message is like a holiday postcard sent through the ordinary mailbox, which can be read by the postman delivering it. So the internet service provides (ISP) can read it because it is a file on the server and can be accessed by the ISP even after you delete it on receipt.
There are laws which provide criminal and civil remedies for wrongful use of the internet and everyone is aware, especially since the creation of the search engine Google that once posted to the internet, personal information and actions are perpetuated. However, not every internet user is aware of how far this can infringe on their privacy. There are two types of personal information on the internet, from one’s own website and on such sites as Face book, controlled private sites available only to members. Sites such as Face book have policies stating that they have ownership of everything posted on their site. They usually have privacy policies also.
It can be argued that people are becoming insensitive to their own privacy because of their own actions. Some individuals even post nude photographs of themselves on the internet and they only have themselves to blame if a prospective employer accesses Google and finds their nude photo on MySpace, for example, and chooses not to offer them a job.
In the US the only federal statute that governs Internet privacy issues is the Children’s Online Protection Act. Children have always been protected from sexual exploitation, especially incest, in most countries in the world because incest, historically, was practiced ever since the Ptolemies as far as we know. In Babylonian law incest was punished by death or exile according to its heinousness. Formerly, incest was not generally treated as a crime in England, although it became punishable by death in 1650. Since the Restoration, it had been releged to the “feeble coercion of the spiritual courts”. In 1883, it was stated that incest in its very worse forms was not a crime by the laws of England because it was classed as an “ecclesiastical offence”. But in 1908, incest became a criminal offence in England through the enactment of the Punishment of Incest Act 1908.
In other respects, privacy norms are dependent on the culture of the particular country. If the definition of a crime is behaviour which is prohibited by the criminal code, it can be argued that this is not a crime. On the other hand, it may be an offence in some jurisdictions if it is deemed to be lewd and lascivious behaviour.
There is a need to rethink what society deems to be the norms of behaviour in order to access whether what a person claims is a libel, defamation or embarrassment, measures up to the social norms. For instance, a hypothetical woman who works as a dentist, claims that she is allergic to rubber in the rubber gloves she must wear at work and so claims a hefty final-salary pension from the UK National Health Service. Suppose someone who knows of her puts a blog on the internet stating that her live-in partner owns a chain of sex shops which retail many sexual products made of rubber and that the video camera in the shops will show the woman happily assisting in the shop. The woman quickly goes to her solicitor, allegedly shocked that the fact that she has a pornographer partner, who runs a sex retail business, has been told to all. But the retail sex shop is in the public domain, the partner’s companies are registered at Companies House, his directorships are in the public domain. She cannot feign shock at being associated with sex products when she had helped in the sex shop herself. This is all information that should be revealed in the personal injuries pre-action protocol before any claim can be brought. Also, it should be disclosed to the employer who will otherwise pay out vast sums which are nothing more than unjust enrishments.
Privacy tends to impose a formalistic, hard-edged, legal categorisation. To argue that a photographed person’s privacy was violated and her reputation damaged through being on a certain website or in a certain shop would be, either that her privacy was violated OR that she was in a public place [the sex shop] and the fact that someone took a picture of her there was not an invasion of privacy since she was not behind closed doors and that she should have realised that her actions of being an assistant in a sex shop, have consequences. The fact is that many situations that used to be private are now public. It is a question of social norms. The world has become a global village and search engines such as Google will be here for the foreseeable future.
Although there is potential for abuse by pornographers, fraudsters and the like, the internet is a very useful tool and contrary to some scaremongering, it is not a threat to privacy but a means of ordinary people to offer information about themselves by way of chat-rooms, blogs, photographs, and most users access the internet to shop or to send emails and to network. An email is a private correspondence written to someone else, similar to a letter. However an email message is like a holiday postcard sent through the ordinary mailbox, which can be read by the postman delivering it. So the internet service provides (ISP) can read it because it is a file on the server and can be accessed by the ISP even after you delete it on receipt.
There are laws which provide criminal and civil remedies for wrongful use of the internet and everyone is aware, especially since the creation of the search engine Google that once posted to the internet, personal information and actions are perpetuated. However, not every internet user is aware of how far this can infringe on their privacy. There are two types of personal information on the internet, from one’s own website and on such sites as Face book, controlled private sites available only to members. Sites such as Face book have policies stating that they have ownership of everything posted on their site. They usually have privacy policies also.
It can be argued that people are becoming insensitive to their own privacy because of their own actions. Some individuals even post nude photographs of themselves on the internet and they only have themselves to blame if a prospective employer accesses Google and finds their nude photo on MySpace, for example, and chooses not to offer them a job.
In the US the only federal statute that governs Internet privacy issues is the Children’s Online Protection Act. Children have always been protected from sexual exploitation, especially incest, in most countries in the world because incest, historically, was practiced ever since the Ptolemies as far as we know. In Babylonian law incest was punished by death or exile according to its heinousness. Formerly, incest was not generally treated as a crime in England, although it became punishable by death in 1650. Since the Restoration, it had been releged to the “feeble coercion of the spiritual courts”. In 1883, it was stated that incest in its very worse forms was not a crime by the laws of England because it was classed as an “ecclesiastical offence”. But in 1908, incest became a criminal offence in England through the enactment of the Punishment of Incest Act 1908.
In other respects, privacy norms are dependent on the culture of the particular country. If the definition of a crime is behaviour which is prohibited by the criminal code, it can be argued that this is not a crime. On the other hand, it may be an offence in some jurisdictions if it is deemed to be lewd and lascivious behaviour.
There is a need to rethink what society deems to be the norms of behaviour in order to access whether what a person claims is a libel, defamation or embarrassment, measures up to the social norms. For instance, a hypothetical woman who works as a dentist, claims that she is allergic to rubber in the rubber gloves she must wear at work and so claims a hefty final-salary pension from the UK National Health Service. Suppose someone who knows of her puts a blog on the internet stating that her live-in partner owns a chain of sex shops which retail many sexual products made of rubber and that the video camera in the shops will show the woman happily assisting in the shop. The woman quickly goes to her solicitor, allegedly shocked that the fact that she has a pornographer partner, who runs a sex retail business, has been told to all. But the retail sex shop is in the public domain, the partner’s companies are registered at Companies House, his directorships are in the public domain. She cannot feign shock at being associated with sex products when she had helped in the sex shop herself. This is all information that should be revealed in the personal injuries pre-action protocol before any claim can be brought. Also, it should be disclosed to the employer who will otherwise pay out vast sums which are nothing more than unjust enrishments.
Privacy tends to impose a formalistic, hard-edged, legal categorisation. To argue that a photographed person’s privacy was violated and her reputation damaged through being on a certain website or in a certain shop would be, either that her privacy was violated OR that she was in a public place [the sex shop] and the fact that someone took a picture of her there was not an invasion of privacy since she was not behind closed doors and that she should have realised that her actions of being an assistant in a sex shop, have consequences. The fact is that many situations that used to be private are now public. It is a question of social norms. The world has become a global village and search engines such as Google will be here for the foreseeable future.
DARTH VADER