On 01/02/2008, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Steve Summit wrote:
Mark Ryan wrote:
With the high profile cases where administrators have been stalked in real life as a result of personally identifiable information they post on the wiki, I feel it's mad for people to post their real names, let alone photos of themselves, names of loved ones or photos of loved ones. Sure, if you stay out of trouble on the wiki the chances of such a thing happening is pretty slight, but there's plenty of nutcases out there to go around.
I don't know Lara and I haven't followed this thread, but I would speculate that her attitude might be similar to mine: I refuse to grant those nutcases that much power. Some tiny number of them exist, who have perpetrated some tiny number of (albeit high-profile) atrocities, and now suddenly nobody else on the entire planet can post pictures of their children to the net? No; I defy that lopsided capitulation.
I absolutely agree. Much of this is a matter of trying to find a middle way between the nutcases and paranoiacs. There is no evidence to show that the proportion of nutcases is any higher than it ever has been. They just have more tools (as do we), and the media relishes giving them more importance than they deserve. There's something dreadfully wrong when we cannot perform normal acts for the sole speculative reason that we might be face-to-face with a nutcase. Being overly protective of children is damaging too when it prevents them from gaining normal life experience.
In a case where it is letting a child go to the park on their own or letting them walk home from school on their own I would disagree that you are in anyway giving them life experience as a fair rational payoff for the risks. I see photos on the internet as having the same bad qualities without any of the supposed good to the child when they find out people did things to a photo of them when they were little, and their parents explicitly encouraged them to do it by licensing the photo a certain way.
Peter