At 10:02 -0800 2004-11-17, Greg Merritt wrote:
>I got this in response to a post I made today...
>
>On Nov 17, 2004, at 9:47 AM, a MAGNet subscriber wrote:
>
>>Dear Greg:
>>
>>Off-topic query: Are you aware that a copy of your below message
>>will very quickly appear in a Google search of your name? I was a
>>little discomfited to discover this. Is there any reason that these
>>messages need to be generally available to the public? No other
>>listserve I belong to has this problem, they are all password
>>protected.
>>
>>Thanks in advance if this is something anyone cares to address,
Greg replied:
>I know that sometimes people have a false sense of security that
>anything they write to an e-mail list is "private", being restricted
>to only the "community" of list subscribers. Hogwash. Do you know
>who's subscribed to MAGNet? I don't. Your message is already
>public as soon as you post it to the hundreds -- or thousands -- of
>list subscribers.
To confirm and expand upon Greg's obervation, the MAGNet mailing
list policy at <http://magnet.berkeley.edu/maillist.html#Policy>
states, in part:
>In an earlier revision of the Interim E-Berkeley Policy, the former
>Electronic Mass Mailings subsection of that Policy also required
>that members be informed what level of privacy is afforded to list
>information. At present, the identity of the list's members and the
>content of the messages posted to the list should both be regarded
>as publicly accessible.
This has traditionally been seen as a strength: postings to this
list are available to the entire Macintosh-using community, for their
benefit, much as we ourselves benefit from being able to view
postings to technical discussions on many other forums and lists, as
well as from being able to find those postings via Internet search
engines.
If the person posting the message sent privately to Greg, above, or
anyone else with misgivings about this degree of openness would like
to further discuss your concerns, I'd be glad to do personally (i.e.
not on the list itself). With - and only with - your permission,
I'd also be willing to summarize our discussions to the list
thereafter.
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
(and administrator of the MAGNet mailing list)
aron@socrates.berkeley.edu
642-5974
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Received on Wed Nov 17 11:03:08 2004
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