Vulgar Comment On Newspaper Site Costs Man His Job

DeeFresh writes "ReadWriteWeb has an article up today discussing an incident in which a school employee lost his job after leaving a comment on the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. After the school employee responded to the newspaper's poll of 'the strangest thing you've ever eaten' with a feline-inspired vulgarity, Kurt Greenbaum, the site's director of social media, tracked down the commenter's identity through his IP address and reported him to school officials. When confronted, the school employee resigned from his job."

Comments

Re:What?

[ZekoMal]

According to TFA, it happened...twice.

Re:"We reserve the right"

[Venerable Vegetable]

Also following excerpts are from their privacy policy:

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally.

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.

Really not paying attention to his readers

[Bazzargh]

Greenbaum is the social media editor at the newspaper. A while back he posted the results of a survey which showed that:
61% of his readers did not want the editors deciding what comments were offensive

Given his response to the comments on the article, I don't think he's any closer to understanding what he was told the first time.