Don’t Count on Your Anonymity
Posted by Melanie Phung on Tuesday, November 1, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Can a corporation force a service provider to reveal the identity of a customer? And then use that information to… oh, say, fire that person? Public Citizen says no way. And from what I know so far, I really hope the court agrees.
Here’s the story: In July 2003, an Allegheny Energy employee posted anonymous criticisms of the company in a Yahoo message board room. He said some not so nice things about Allegheny and used a racist term to describe the company’s diversity program, which he called a waste of money. Okay, so he’s not a nice guy, but…
Three months later, the company files a lawsuit against “John Doe” (in a random jurisdiction) as an excuse to subpoena Yahoo to reveal John Doe’s identity.
After they found out who he was they dropped the suit and fired the guy.
The reason Allegheny filed a lawsuit against “John Doe” was only to find out who he was? And on top of that, a court helps this ploy along by forcing Yahoo to disclose what by all rights is proprietary information.
Hm.
A dramatic reminder that one should always be very, very careful about what content one posts in a public forum. (And face it, if it’s on the Web, it’s public.)
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