If you thought your Comments were Safe Online – Think Again!
Imagine, an institution who felt they were being defamed by user comments and posts online and that institution could ask for and get the identity of all commenter’s, even if the comments were posted anonymously…. Sounds ridiculous, right? Because the very reason why anonymous posts and comments exist is to allow the public to express their true thoughts on items that affect their lives and day-to-day being, with no apprehension. Well, it may not be that ridiculous after all. We’ve been following the story of a New Jersey School Board who served a subpoena to the New Jersey Online (Newark Star Ledger), to get the names of the commenter’s from a story they ran about questionable behavior of School Board officials. The story that caused the hoopla in the first place concerned several school board leaders who allegedly, knowingly, attained fake degrees from an online diploma mill. The supposed fake degrees, enabled these officials to vie for higher salaries. In defense of the subpoena, board officials stated that they wanted to be sure that the offenders were not members of their staff. They also felt the public, those who made the supposed injurious comments, had defamed the board and as a result, action must be taken.
The subpoena was served in September and we’ve been following the story ever since. The implications of what the New Jersey board was trying to do, could have affected online publishing nationwide. Should they be successful, this precedent would negatively affect many of the online business models that publishers have adopted around UGC, and would have been injurious to the behaviors we’ve come accustom to on the Web, during the Web 2.0 era.
Late last week, we finally learned that the New Jersey School Board decided to drop the subpoena at this time. They probably found some truth to the story or were getting an incredible amount of flack from the online community. Either way, better the subpoena is dropped, as this would have meant a giant step back for the online community and would have meant incredulous transformations to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
