I think that something that has emerged from this discussion (and other discussions I've had online) is that different people feel differently about privacy and about what constitutes a breech of privacy.

For example, I do not post anything that may lead someone to link my internet identity / identities to my RL identity. Why? Because I post very personal stuff under a couple of internet identities. I wouldn't want my supervisors or my RL aquaintances to know I had written that stuff.

What is on the internet is publicly viewable.

Some sites are more public than others, however. Some sites link the messages that are posted to google. Some sites are publicly viewable (like this one). Some sites require a password to read the messages, but the list of forums is publicly viewable (and sometimes the title of the most recent post). Some sites require a password to even view the list of forums.

But while it is best not to be overly paranoid about things... What is on the internet (including what is in your email in and outbox) can be viewed by third parties.

I do think it is wise to bear that in mind with what you post. I think the internet can lull people into a false sense of security on that score.

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Different people do indeed have different notions of privacy. I've given my email address to a fair few people I've met on the internet now. One of those people decided to send group emails and thus my email address became available to a lot of people I knew who I hadn't exchanged email addresses with. I felt mad for a bit, yeah. But I sent an email to the person and asked her to please not do that because I considered it to be a breech in privacy. She apologised. She didn't think it was a breech in privacy she thought it was okay to share email addresses. Now she knows how I feel about it, however. I trust her not to do that again and now she realises that she should feel privaledged that I chose to give her my email address as I'm fairly careful about who I give it to. And... I'm talking about an anonymous hotmail / gmail address here, not my work email address that discloses my real name etc.

Regarding posts... It is possible for anybody on the internet to view psychcentral posts. It is also possible (though unlikely) that people could hack into someones PM's. The same way that it is possible (though unlikely) that people could hack into ones email account. Different people feel differently about what constitutes a breech of confidence / privacy.

If I copied someones post and saved it in a word document on my computer, for example I could be intending to:

- read the post when I'm feeling low because the I find the post to be uplifting in some way.
- read the post when I'm feeling better because the poster has hit upon issues that I need to work on.
- pass the post onto someone else becaue I think the post could help them.

There are many good (and well intentioned) reasons why one might do that. A person might do that *for those reasons* not at all intending to hurt anybody or breech anybodies privacy.

But of course there are a lot of less noble intentions as well.

To the best of my knowledge this site has the rule that what is on the board stays on the board so people shouldn't print out posts or copy them into something else and save them or forward them on etc. One probably isn't supposed to save or pass on a link to posts either.

I respect that.

But I do think that people should be careful about:
- Assuming that when someone breeches ones sense of privacy the person *intended* to do that.
- Assuming that when someone breeches ones sense of privacy the person has malevolent intent.
- Retaliating.

And one should remember that while posters on this site have probably read the rules lurkers here probably haven't. The only way that one could prevent lurkers doing the above things would be to not let lurkers view the site. But then... Less new posters would join up. And that wouldn't do anything with respect to the posters on the site who haven't really read the rules or who read the rules and decided to do it anyway...

Peace.