Feminist SF Wiki talk:Privacy policy
Laura, thanks for making a start on this, with the weight of your position as webmistress to underline the credibility of this (preliminary, but still mattering) policy draft.
I see though that you have approached the matter of pseudonyms from the perspective of looking at someone who knows a person under their legal name revealing that other person's pseudonymous identity. I don't know how I can phrase this more clearly...(See the nota bene for another qualification.) Of bringing someone's pseudonymous identity to light in a way that will have repercussions on their life under their legal name, that will make it known to other people who know the person under that person's legal name. That's is one way of looking at things, but from the other side, the side from which I've been looking at the developments of Racefail 09, I was looking at someone revealing the legal name of a person in the context of interactions done under a pseudonym, and bringing their legal identity to the attention of people familiar with that person's pseudonym.
Put together, both perspectives describe the same act, and that act has consequences that go in both directions (affecting as they do the person outed, whose circumstances affect how they interact under each identity; and the consequences of the outing ripple out in the communities the outing reaches, which can overlap), but I strongly feel that it's important to formulate the matter both ways, because knowing the legal name of someone who has standing under a (or several) pseudonym doesn't qualititatively feel important the same way as knowing the pseudonym(s) of someone for the purposes of interacting with them under their legal name(s).
I would simply edit the entry to add the complementary aspect, but, you being the lawyer, I was wondering if you were taking a particular law-related approach in formulating this policy, which would influence the importance of wording it one way instead of the other.
N.B.: I say legal vs. pseudonymous for lack of better words because I also don't want to link either perspective exclusively to the terms public or private, although that might be a question where you also have legal vocabulary issues in mind. The distinction seems too muddled to me -- people using pseudonyms aren't necessarily interacting in private, although the circles where the pseudonymous identity is relevent may seem private by their being specialised forums instead of general or unmarked forums. And the legal identities, not the pseudonymous identities, particularly in the examples I can think of, of the people outed, are often the private sites that are put at risk from an outing.
Do you have any recommendations or considerations on these questions of perspective?
--Ide Cyan 04:28, 5 March 2009 (UTC)