CNN.com is carrying a story today about a lawsuit from back in 2004 that may soon come to trial, involving Robert Steinbuch, a former Senate aid whose girlfriend, also a Senate aide at the time, posted details about their sex life on her personal blog--including tidbits about his preferences for spanking but not for condoms.
There are many lessons in this little newsbyte, but this is the one that may prove most relevant to us here:
If the case goes to trial, its outcome will be important both to bloggers and to people who chronicle their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he may teach the Washingtonienne case this spring during his class at Georgetown Law School.
"Anybody who wants to reveal their own private life has a right to do that. It's a different question when you reveal someone else's private life," he said, adding that simply calling something a diary doesn't make it one. "It's not sitting in a nice, leather-bound book under a pillow. It's online where a million people can find it."
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Lurid testimony about spanking, handcuffs and prostitution aside, the Washingtonienne case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline.
It’s an interesting debate. The girlfriend claims the information was only intended for her own friends, and that she can’t be held responsible for the fact that Wonkette discovered her personal blog and linked to it, giving her sex life—and all her partners’ sex lives---a much, much, larger public stage. Steinbuch argues that private details of his life were published without his consent.
To win, Steinbuch will have to prove that the details of their sexual relationship were private and publishing them was highly offensive. Billips argues that Cutler never intended to make the blog public but, in the information age, data is easily copied and distributed beyond its intended audience.
How do we balance free speech issues with privacy rights of subjects? The old guidelines about whether or not someone has chosen to be a "public figure" seem outdated in a world of YouTube and MySpace. Is it enough to mask identities of the people we write about, or are we as bloggers held accountable if we publish enough of our own personal information that someone with even limited CSI skills can also sleuth out the identities of the other folks about whom we blog?
Soon, the courts may be telling us just what does and does not cross the virtual line.
Cross-posted at Street Prophets.