privacy problems

There is a lot of public information on the internet. Probably more than most people realize. You can take a person’s name and put it in a google search and find out where they live, their e-mail, their phone number, how much their house cost, what they do for a living, etc.
In journalism, there are ethcal boundaries by which journalists can not overstep. It wouldn’t be ethical for a journalist to irrelevently place background information about a subject obtained online in an article. They would lose their job. However, bloggers are not necessarily bound by these ethics.
According to Fernanda B. Viégas, “As blog writers become increasingly prolific, however, they are likely to encounter issues of privacy and liability. For example, accounts of bloggers hurting friends' feelings or losing their jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent.”
A 2004 article in The Boston Globe discusses Michael Hanscom, who formerly worked in a printing shop at the Redmond, Washington headquarters of Microsoft, who was fired after he posted a picture of a shipment of Apple computers being shipped to Microsoft headquarters.
Blogging isn’t the same as journalism, but this shows how when there areno boundaries by which people are kept for publishing information, there will be consequences. In no way am I saying there should be a list of “blogging laws,” but it just shows how public and open information has become. It probably was not hard for Hanscom’s employers to find out he had a blog and that blog lost him his job.
In Viégas’s article, “Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability,” she writes, “By their very nature, blogs raise a number of privacy issues. On the one hand, they are persistent and cumulative. At the same time, they are easy to produce and disseminate, resulting in large amounts of sometimes personal information being broadcast across the Internet.”
She points out that blogs are different from normal web pages in the way that blogs compile posts rather than substitute new material for old. Viégas’s study took 492 bloggers and had them complete a questionnaire focusing on content, identity management, audience and control features, and persistence.
“Most respondents (83%) said their entries could be characterized as "personal musings" whereas a smaller portion of people (20%) described their entries as being mostly compilations of links. When asked how often they had posted highly personal materials on their blogs, 25% of respondents said they had done so fairly often. Only 19% of respondents said they had never posted anything highly personal on their blogs.”
These sort of actions either take advantage of easily accessable public information, or it can add to it. If you are looking up person and you can find their phone number, address, family, job, etc., and you can find their personal blog where they post personal information about themselves, you suddenly have a lot of information about a person you do not know.