St. Louis Post-Dispatch Under Fire For Revealing Emailer’s Identity
Thanks to my friend Mike Barlow for tipping us off about how a newspaper can really screw up. The complete article from AwfulMarketing is here.
St. Louis Newspaper Has Web Commenter Fired
November 19th, 2009 | Awful Incidents, Awful Publicity
In this new information age, newspapers are having a hard time hanging on to their old business models, and are struggling to hold on to readership and monetize their on-line content. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has obviously not run into this issue, or they wouldn’t be shooting themselves in the foot by getting people fired when they post to the paper’s online comment boards.
So here’s the scoop – Post-Dispatch columnist and Social Media Director Kurt Greenbaum posted a note on the Talk of the Day section of the newspaper’s Web site, stltoday.com, asking readers to write in and comment on the strangest thing they’ve ever eaten. It was somewhat related to a story the paper had run on eating venison.
Well, before you know it, someone writes in on the comment box “Pu**y.” For those of you who can’t read between the *’s, it is a feline expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. Got it now? Good.
The moderators at the stltoday.com site removed the post, and the commentor tried again, and it was removed a second time. Now, here is where the line was crossed.
In violation of the newspaper’s privacy policy, Greenbaum traced the IP address of the anonymous commenter to a private school, and contacted the headmaster of the school to tell him of the two offending posts. He also provided the headmaster with the IP address of the poster’s computer, and timestamp information that allowed the IT staff at the school to pinpoint the exact computer and who was using it at the time the comment was posted.
The poster turned out to be a school employee (we don’t know yet if it was a faculty member, support staff, administrator, etc.) and that employee, when approached by the headmaster, resigned from the school upon hearing that his comments had been traced.
After the employee resigned, the headmaster called Greenbaum to let him know how the incident played out, and Greenbaum blogged about it on his personal blog, as well as on his blog on the stltoday.com site.
So what’s the lesson here? Don’t trust the news media with your IP address – your anonymous comments could be tracked down by an irate editor with an axe to grind!
What do you think – was Greenbaum in the wrong here? Let the St. Louis Post-Dispatch know how you feel:
Similar Posts:
- Schools: Inefficiency At Work
- TOPIX.com Under Investigation By Conn AG
- For-profit Colleges Tapping Taxpayers For Profit
- Conn Humane Society President Allegedly Used Staff To Help Run For State Senate
- CL&P Bills Don’t Make Sense
5 Responses for “St. Louis Post-Dispatch Under Fire For Revealing Emailer’s Identity”
Leave a Reply
Advertisements
whatever security of the network, you should be able to VPN from anywhere. VPN creates a secured encrypted tunnel into your work network which should make the connection secure and not be vulnerable. even if someone tries to pickup the packets, the info is encrpyted and not accessible. Good luck.
Of course he was wrong.
And stupid too.
And that his decision is even being debated as to whether it is legitimate currency is a wonderment.
And Yahoo was wrong too, for outing its users to the chinese who put those user/s in prison.
The question is, is there a damn thing right anymore?
…..I don’t think the newspaper guarantees that the identities of posters will remain anonymous. In fact, to get on the “letters to the editor” page, most papers require a real name and address. It’s also pretty stupid to make offensive posts on a newspaper thread. If anyone’s going to be able to track you down, it’s going to be a reporter!
I have a split decision on this one:
1. It was wrong of the employee (even if it was a janitor) to use school property and time “on the clock” to post comments to a newspaper online, regardless of what the comment was.
2. It was wrong of the paper’s staff to track the IP address and notify the owners of that address of the incident. It seems obvious that the comment was offensive (and probably against the TOS of the commenting area), but after removing it twice, the paper should have just banned the IP address (almost all comment boards have this feature) and that would have been the end of it, most likely.
3. Since the employer was notified that one of their employees was doing something that shouldn’t be done on the clock (use of the Internet for personal reasons), they should have disciplined the employee, but from the info. as stated now, the employee resigned on the spot without the opportunity to be warned and disciplined.
This brings about the idea that no one is truly anonymous online to the forefront and while what the person did type was offensive (to some, at least), it wasn’t illegal.
Then again, I’m of the thought that if we weren’t in such a state of crappy management and laid-back attitudes about work, most people would be too busy at work to have time to be farting off on the internet or their smartphones while being paid to do their job.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by George Gombossy, Daniel B. Honigman. Daniel B. Honigman said: RT @CTWatchdog St. Louis Post-Dispatch Under Fire For Revealing Emailer’s Identity http://bit.ly/7uHQm2 [...]