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EFF Guide To Blogging Anonymously
jacksonwest writes "Annalee Newitz and Kurt Opsahl just published a great how-to on blogging anonymously. How To Blog Safely About Work (Or Anything Else), covering both the legal and technical aspects of blogging about your job and staying truly anonymous. A must read for those blogging from or about their office."
that this person didn't see this article earlier
Quote: California has a law protecting employees from "demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises.
Posting pictures of yourself isn't illegal, but it didn't help the Queen of the Air...
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
Just be careful in what you do, and it should be good.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I don't see how you can stay anonymous and say anything really interesting about your office. Of course you can say "my office has cubes" and nobody will smell you out, but if you say "I know all about the shape of the new iMac" there are only a few people that could have known that, and they will figure you out. Certainly there are variations within those two extremes, but the more unique and valuable your knowledge, the more likely they are to nail you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view. I read a number of these (I actually started reading their logs for some tech project they were on but kept on after finding out that they have lives that don't revolve around first person shooters). They seem to write out of a need to get some sort of honesty about what's going on.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
If I were a future employer and came across his blog, the level of maturity he displayed would go a lot further than whether he mentioned someone by name. Not everyone's that way, but jeez, if you are completely anonymous writing stuff seems like a waste of time.
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address. If you want to write about your stresses and successes, do so in a mature way. If you want to bitch and moan and try to assasinate someone's integrity, be prepared to take the consequences for your juvenile tantrums.
Advice to Chinese dissidents: If you are going to be anonymous, use a pseudonym and digitally sign your stuff .. so that others know it's actually you and/or your dissident group .. that way you can build credibility with a reduced chance of being screwed.
Being totally anonymous isn't very effective, unless what you are saying can really stand on it's own (that is, it's stating provable logic rather than facts/events).
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Let me be the first to say that I, and many others, within the information gathering business use blogs including slashdot to collect information about our competitors. Competitors can be from business to government agencies.
Passive information gathering from open sources goes on all the time especially here on slashdot where certain people give away pretty useful information about the current state of where they work including technical and operational matters.
Some of this information might seem innocuous to many of you but for us 'in the know' we realise that some of you posters provide us with a goldmine of competitive intelligence because we recognize its context. It's basically reverse social engineering in action and it works because humans are social beings who want to 'connect' with their online social peers. We don't even have to resort to using 'recruitable weaknesses' like ideology, money or sex. Some of you people just blurt it out just because you want to be accepted.
Here this bloggers who work in sensitive environment: Awareness of your surroundings can be a wonderful thing.
I was curious as to what Slashdot's IP logging policy is, particularly for AC posts. From the faq, fyi:
We log the usual stuff (IP, page, time, user, page views, moderation, and comment posting, mainly). A few other odds and ends too, but mostly the data is used to make moderation possible. We keep the logs for 48 hours.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair