Posted by Rick on January 22, 2002, at 19:06:12
In reply to Re: Posting of email addresses, posted by fi on January 22, 2002, at 9:55:17
> There are *millions* of people out there with access to the messages we post on the Board. This will be helpful for some, but remember not all are nice people.Greg could apparently attest to that based on the experiences he recounted. Maybe I've been lucky. Back when I used to actually get a fair number of email responses to posts the worst was a poster who developed an unreasonable expectation for me to write every few days to provide her encouragement and support. At first it was OK, but then it became burdensome. I kind of got myself into that mess. Also, I was sent a few unexpected articles by a particular individual who used to post here. Odd, but not offensive.
Other than that, all of the e-mail exchanges have ranged from very positive to "neutral".
> Once someone gets a message with an email, they can use that in both directions: its often easy to find out a lot about someone once you have an email address
Is this true if one sets up, say a "throwaway" Yahoo account that never gets used except for offline discussion-board one-to-one communication, and that is set to display only the first name or a made-up name?
>and if they bother to read all the messages an individual has posted to the Board in the past, they will gather some very personal information. I'm not saying this *will* happen with a non-anonymous email, just that it is a risk.
In the scenario I gave above, they might learn a lot about "fi", but how would they know who fi really is? For that matter, I don't know if you're the same person as the "Fi" (capital F) who posted a little further down. AOL got in a boatload of trouble a couple years ago for telling the *U.S. Army* who owned a particular chat handle when they wanted to prove this military man was gay (the horror!). If AOL got whipped for confirming the guy's name at the request of a government agency, why would they give out an email holder's actual name and address to anybody except maybe the FBI? (Unless the privay policy specifically allows it -- that's why I warned Mair about reading Yahoo's privacy policy.)
I don't know, maybe even a "throwaway" email address that's never used with my full name presents a small risk than I'm unaware of, but at this point I don't feel very concerned. (Although the "forwarding" surprise I described in the response to Mair does give me pasue...)
> I liked Dr Bob's idea (if I have understood it) that there could be some way of setting up something so you could be emailed by Board members, whilst staying anonymous.
That would be a great way to offer people more of a sense of security for 1:1 communications.
Rick
poster:Rick
thread:2697
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20011216/msgs/2715.html