A Web of privacy?

Internet users, beware. The newspaper could be looking over your shoulder. That warning label perhaps should be pasted on community forums, chat rooms and other online gathering places as, increasingly, we communicate with each other through cyberspace. You may think your online neighborhood message board is "private," but chances are it's not.

Residents of a Raleigh neighborhood learned that recently when they were surprised to find themselves quoted in The News & Observer about a local controversy. They had posted comments on a Yahoo group site for residents of the Fox Run neighborhood about a nearby nightclub that neighbors complained was a public nuisance. The N&O quoted three messages posted on the site with the authors' names attached. One said, "we all need to push hard as we can, any way that we can to get this place closed down for good."

It's not the kind of comment that would endear the person to the nightclub owners or patrons, and the resident complained to The N&O reporter that he had expected his posting would be confined to neighbors on the Web site. Another Fox Runner called me to complain.

This kind of situation -- the newspaper's use of personal information posted on the Internet -- has happened before. In the murder of Clayton resident Paul Berkley late last year, The N&O found the Web log of his 16-year-old daughter and published her thoughts about her father's killing. The paper also ran a picture of her Web site, which enabled readers to go there and, in some instances, leave derogatory messages. Publishing from her blog, some readers said, was like stealing a diary from her bedroom. The paper's response: it was a public Web site.

The issue will come up with increasing frequency as newspapers' quest for information intersects with growing use of the Internet as a tool for personal communication by private citizens. Public citizens too, for that matter. The Spokane newspaper recently caught the city's mayor soliciting gay sex over the Internet when the paper posed as an online sex partner after receiving a tip about him.

What sort of standards, if any, should a newspaper have in using the Internet as a reporting tool, especially about private citizens? We had a lively conversation about that question last week at an in-house workshop on fairness. (Yes, we do talk among ourselves regularly about how to be fair.)

Most in the group were of the opinion that the Internet is public domain and anything posted there is fair game for publication. But there also was a strong argument that we shouldn't publish people's statements without their permission.

David Feld is The N&O's news director for interactive media. "My feeling is that if the communications are not behind a private, members-only wall, that means it's like having a group meeting in the middle of the town square," he told me. "I can't imagine that you can have an expectation of privacy without an attempt to control access to the forum, chat room or logs that you use to communicate."

In the Fox Run case, the community site was a Yahoo message group. To access it, you need to have a Yahoo account, which is free but does require a user login and password. The N&O reporters -- who had been tipped off to the site by an anonymous e-mail -- had Yahoo accounts.

Dan Holly is editor of The North Raleigh News, which is the N&O section in which the story appeared. He said he understood why the quoted residents might feel aggrieved at seeing their names in the paper, but he thought their community site was fair game: "The message board was an accurate and honest way for us to get a sampling of neighborhood opinion."

Holly also said, "When you have a group that is setting out to do something as bold as shutting down a legitimate business, it seems like getting your name in the paper is something that is bound to happen."

I have a feeling that the residents had no such expectation -- obviously, or they wouldn't have called to complain. I think we should have called the residents, for a couple of reasons.

First, a newspaper's first obligation is verification, and we couldn't have known for sure that the authors of the messages were who we said they were without checking with them.

But beyond that, newspapers don't normally quote people, especially those not savvy about media, without their knowledge. A good rule of thumb is if we can expect that, in most cases, people would be surprised to see their statements in the paper, we should check with them first. Sometimes that means we'll miss a juicy quote or even a story, but the newspaper's reputation for fairness is more important.