Privacy

Key Takeaways:

• What you do when information that users provide to your site    is limited both by law and by your own privacy policy and terms of use. Be careful!

• The closer a news outlet is to the community it covers, and the smaller that community is, the more likely it is that readers will recognize a face, a name, or a license plate. Keep that in mind in coverage of crimes, accidents and similar stories.

• Sometimes journalists choose to violate a story subject’s privacy in the cause of some greater community good. If you do, think it through, and be prepared for a storm.

 Sticking to policy

A couple of years ago during a city council election in Dallas, we had a big story that probably changed the results of an election – and a lot of it came from work around who had done what on our website.

We had somebody during the city council race come in and post a comment on one of the candidate pages, which showed all of that candidate’s contributors. It said that they couldn’t believe this person was up for city council because they’ve been convicted of multiple felonies and lied about it. So we did what is our general policy with an accusation like that – we remove the comment. It doesn’t just disappear, it always says, “this comment removed by site staff,” and we post a comment explaining why we removed it. We said, the last comment contains serious allegations that aren’t substantiated, and we’ve got to look deeper into it to let you know if it is legit or not.

At the same time that went down, we got a user who had registered for the site who emailed us to say, I never registered for this account, I don’t know why I got this confirmation email, what the hell? Our CTO started investigating that — we took it seriously. Long story short, the email claiming that they’d never signed up for the account came from the son of the opposition candidate, who lived in San Antonio. And the comments with the allegations – which were partially true, it wound up – were posted from the same IP address. So in the end what we wound up breaking was, (a) one of the city council candidates has felonies she hadn’t disclosed, and (b) her opposition candidate is the one throwing this out there.

There was a lot of discussion in our user community, and everybody tended to really come down on our side. But how did they feel about our manipulating IP address data and email address data to figure this stuff out? We just laid it all out for everyone to see.

 The client’s always right, right?

We published an image of a classified ad, exactly as it had been printed, and that included a phone number. The placer of the ad threatened us with legal action if we did not remove the phone number.  At that point, it had been six months since the post had gone up, so we removed it, we just obscured the number so he wasn’t getting calls any more. It was kind of funny to me that he was upset about his phone number being out there, since he put it in an ad! But I guess he was getting harassing calls.

 Taken some items down as a courtesy

I wouldn’t write about a kid without permission. Photos of kids, too, unless it’s a situation where it’s outside, or they’ve given consent or whatever.

The local public figure’s fair game, in our mind. I don’t mean hunting them down. But if they’re going to say stuff, it’s out there, we’ll report on it, and they know that.

Very infrequently, you do get people who are characters, they’re public figures in the town. Which is a funny thing to say – we’re not talking about Madonna. But the local public figure’s fair game, in our mind. I don’t mean hunting them down. But if they’re going to say stuff, it’s out there, we’ll report on it, and they know that. We’re not going to make fun of them. We’re also very sensitive to the fact that they are public figures, out in the limelight. It’s a balance.

I’m talking about any council member. A mayor. Stephen Colbert is a public figure in our town, he lives there. Bobbi Brown. Although we’re not gonna talk about her children.

We had an issue with Whoopi Goldberg, where we wrote that she moved to a neighboring town we cover. We wrote about the area, we didn’t give the address, but we mentioned some details – stuff that’s public record. We’re not the only website that had it. And we got a call from her lawyer asking us to take it down. It had already been up for a while. So we did take it down, as a courtesy. First of all, we didn’t want the hassle, even though we felt we were completely in our rights. We’d already got the mileage out of it. And she was really concerned about stalking, that’s what the lawyer was saying. Again, we’re local, and we have that Google juice. If Gawker writes about it, people are reading it all over New York, but they’re not necessarily in Jersey, in stumbling distance.

 Handling suicide

Someone I knew who managed a couple of websites about local history died just about a year ago and it turned out that she committed suicide. I did not report that she committed suicide. I’m not sure what a mainstream news organization would have done in that situation. It was a case where it didn’t feel like it was the community’s business.

 Double-check on your permissions

I try to get IDs on every photo I run. One of the local daycare centers is always inviting me over to take pictures, but they won’t provide any IDs. The remainder of the daycares round here all have foreseen the issue and they get the parents to sign releases.

There was one case where, with the help of a teacher at this one daycare, I did a story and got a picture that ran on the site. I got incredibly hostile mail from the people who ran the center, saying I didn’t have permission. And I was working with a teacher, so I thought I was on safe ground. So my policy is, to make sure when I go to these places that people know I’m about to publish it on the web.

 License to run a photo from a fatal crash

Yesterday there was a fatal accident. And I had a really good solid news shot that showed both cars. I’m the only one who got the shot – because I stuck around till the firetruck moved. But the front car, the car that had the passenger in it that was fatal, you can clearly see the license plate. I published that picture before the name was released, which means not all the notifications had gone out.

I got blasted by a reader whose daughter drives the same kind of car with a license plate that also begins with the three letters it had. She called her daughter in a panic. But she said the lady who was next to her wherever they were saw the picture and was devastated – she knew whose car it was. But she was just a friend, so she wouldn’t have been part of the notification chain.

So maybe in the future I need to be mindful of obscuring the license plate, or just waiting another couple of hours. One of the things that played into my position was that the daily newspaper had published a picture with the license plate before I did. On the other hand, this came up in comments, that photo also probably reassured a lot of people: that is not my daughter’s car.  It comes back again to who am I to judge?

 Sometimes a story has to be more than just a story

We had a rash of suicides. Health officials later came in and said it was an issue where kids were killing themselves and/or having fatal drug overdoses and it was becoming a contagion. Kid A thinks he’s shit, kills himself. Kid B feels he’s shit, sees that Kid A has been celebrated in the paper, with little roadside memorials, that sort of thing, kills himself thinking that he’ll then become somebody because he’s killed himself. And I didn’t know what it was when I was first reporting on it. It’s a drug overdose. I had never heard of this contagious suicide.

Then we started figuring it out. OK, we have another 19-year-old dead kid, what do we do?  This was the stage where kids were being overprescribed Oxycontin for sports injuries, and then they chew them to get around the time release – 8 hours all at once. He was chewing Oxycontin, he died. I said, OK, I’m sick of the dead kids – this is going to stop. We’re going to cover this like his death, and the process of his death, was a news event. So I went in and I got every detail I could – coroner’s reports, folks tipping me off in the hospital. I worked this like this was the president had been shot, and had a reporter who was totally game, too, busting his ass on it. We wrote a story that basically said, this kid did not die this glorious death that you are envisioning: he died because he choked on his own vomit. This is not glamorous; this was horrid. We’re not going to glorify this child’s life; we’re gonna say how horrid his death was, because this stops now.

The day this story came out, 11 kids went to health services at the high school and got help…I don’t know that I would do that twice. 

We named the kid who died. He was from a very prominent family; his grandfather had been a city official. Very well-known. Something wrong happened in this kid’s life, some bad choices got out of control.

When the story came out, I had a group of young men who had pills jangling in their pockets and glassy eyes come in and physically threaten me in my office. I had a woman who called the publisher and said what I had done was horrible, and she hoped that I died by choking on my own vomit – which got his attention.

But the day this story came out, 11 kids went to health services at the high school and got help. That was 11 kids in my column, I thought.

I don’t know that I would do that twice.

 Be upfront and use your judgment

The first ethical issue I had to deal with as the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette was the guy who came into my office wanting to know who the commenter was on our site who had accused him of sexual assault. Which of course raised issues. Somebody had already spotted that and removed it, but we didn’t prescreen our comments, so someone was free to accuse somebody of sexual assault on our website. But then secondly, do I give this person whatever identification we have, which would be IP address and email address that they used to register? The “never reveal your sources” part of me that spent so long as a reporter, its initial reaction is “no.” But then my second reaction is, wait a second – when I promise somebody confidentiality, we have a discussion face to face. I ask, why are we going off the record? Am I willing to go to jail as necessary to protect this person’s identity? We had no such discussion with this asshole who was commenting – I didn’t even know if the comment was true. So it’s not the same thing.

When you think it through and have these discussions, you’re not going to end up with a “thou shalt not” rule, or a simple rule. You can have standards, but then you use judgment as you apply them in particular situations.

So should the terms of service (or somewhere more public, since nobody reads the terms of service) say that if you violate the terms of service, if you defame somebody, we’ll supply your contact information? First of all, we’re going to need to decide whether to even allow anonymous comments. But if we’re going to allow them, we’re not going to protect people who don’t play by our rules. When I make a deal with a source, I might tell that person, if you’re lying to me then I will give you up. So when you think it through and have these discussions, you’re not going to end up with a “thou shalt not” rule, or a simple rule. You can have standards, but then you use judgment as you apply them in particular situations.

 Know your own ethical template

Privacy issues are where the lessons from community newspaper editors come to the fore. Because you might be looking at that person the next morning at the diner. And frankly I think that’s healthy. You ask yourself, first thing: OK, when I see this person across the table the next day, do I have a good response other than the kneejerk “it’s public information?”

Each person has to decide for themselves that ethical template. Which is, what are the overriding needs in terms of privacy versus public information – or public knowing.

And each person has to decide for themselves that ethical template. Which is, what are the overriding needs in terms of privacy versus public information – or public knowing? So for instance, we don’t report suicide for people over, I think it’s 50, because we don’t report cause of death over 50. The presumption is, somebody dies before 50, it’s an unnatural thing and therefore the public wants to know what happened. But you gotta work through that before it comes up. Then at least you have an explanation that’s more than just “We’re a newspaper. We’re a news site.” Then at least you can hold your head up regardless of whether the arguments afterward make you change your mind, which has happened to me more than once.

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Share your story below: Have you publicly identified someone online and then changed your mind? What happened?