Internet Shaming

The WSJ reported:

Last month, Eva Burgess was eating breakfast at the Rose Cafe in Venice, Calif., when she remembered she needed to make an appointment with her eye doctor. So the New York theater director got on her cellphone and booked a date.

Almost immediately, she started receiving “weird and creepy” calls directing her to a blog. There, under the posting “Eva Burgess Is Getting Glasses!” her name, cellphone number and other details mentioned in her call to the doctor’s office were posted, along with the admonition, “next time, you might take your business outside.” The offended blogger had been sitting next to Ms. Burgess in the cafe.

It used to be the worst you could get for a petty wrong in public was a rude look. Now, it’s not just brutal police officers, panty-free celebrities and wayward politicians who are being outed online. The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking (Caughtya.org) and leering (HollaBackNYC.com) to littering (LitterButt.com) and general bad behavior (RudePeople.com). One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre

At Concurring Opinions, Kaimipono Wenger added:

Quick google-checking turns up the blog in question, AdviceGoddess.com, the site of a syndicated advice columnist named Amy Alkon. Ms. Alkon’s original post does indeed contain Ms. Burgess’s information. In comments to that post, she defends her decision to put that information online, noting that her ire stems in part from Ms. Burgess’s failure to apply the “do unto others” principle. (There is no indication in the comment that Ms. Alkon realizes the irony of that statement.) Later, Ms. Alkon elaborates further:

I posted freely dispensed news. I didn’t wiretap the girl’s phone or listen at her keyhole. She shouted the information out to the public, which suggests that she was happy to have the public in possession of her phone number and all the rest of the information she dispensed.

This “waiver” argument comes up releatedly in comments, as Ms. Alkon and several of her comment interlocutors assert that Ms. Burgess’s public phone conversation destroys any legal expectation of privacy. (See, e.g., comments in this follow-up post at Ms. Alkon’s blog.) In fact, as many readers of this blog probably know, the law is much more complex. In particular, some jurisdictions (including California) have recognized a doctrine of limited privacy.

A very good discussion of the limited privacy doctrine can be found in the recent privacy article by Lior Strahilevitz (who, incidentally, gets mentioned in the WSJ piece for his “How am I driving?” article)   …

Read Wenger’s excellent post in full here.