On 6/21/07, Tony Sidaway
<tonysidaway(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/21/07, Todd Allen
<toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
What -is- the ethical
question? The information is already easily available to anyone who
wishes to find it, so right-to-privacy doesn't hold.
Actually, it does. We are not a newspaper archive and our standards
are not theirs. If we do not need to use the names of living private
individuals, we should not do so, because *every* publication of
information about a private individual diminishes his privacy, and
while we are not in a position to control the contents of many
newspaper archives, we certainly are in complete control of one of the
most popular information sources on the planet. We should not
needlessly compromise privacy.
I can only agree with that for some value of "needlessly". While
there are some cases where there's absolutely no benefit to adding a
name to an article, and other cases where there's absolutely no point
in having an article without having a name, it's those in-between
cases that are the ones where we have to make a judgment.
Absolutely. The key is that we should always ask ourselves if
including the names of private individuals is necessary for
completeness. Usually it isn't.