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How
to blog safely (About work or anything else)
Electronic
Frontier Foundation
April 06,
2005
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Anonymity/blog-anonymously.php
Blogs are like personal
telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They're the perfect tool for
sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends--or for upholding
the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt
government official has been paying off your boss.
If you blog, there
are no guarantees you'll attract a readership of thousands. But at least
a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you'd least
want or expect. These include potential or current employers, coworkers,
and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your
family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address
or screen name into Google or Feedster and click a few links.
The point is that
anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to
it in some way. And there may be consequences. Family members may be shocked
or upset when they read your uncensored thoughts. A potential boss may
think twice about hiring you. But these concerns shouldn't stop you from
writing. Instead, they should inspire you to keep your blog private, or
accessible only to certain trusted people.
Here we offer a few
simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy
so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation. If
followed correctly, these protections can save you from embarrassment
or just plain weirdness in front of your friends and coworkers.
Blog anonymously
The best way to
blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously. But being
anonymous isn't as easy as you might think.
Let's say you want
to start a blog about your terrible work environment but you don't want
to risk your boss or colleagues discovering that you're writing about
them. You'll want to consider how to anonymize every possible detail about
your situation. And you may also want to use one of several technologies
that make it hard for anyone to trace the blog back to you.
1. Use a pseudonym
and don't give away any identifying details
When you
write about your workplace, be sure not to give away telling details.
These include things like where you're located, how many employees there
are, and the specific sort of business you do. Even general details can
give away a lot. If, for example, you write, "I work at an unnamed weekly
newspaper in Seattle," it's clear that you work in one of two places.
So be smart. Instead, you might say that you work at a media outlet in
a mid-sized city. Obviously, don't use real names or post pictures of
yourself. And don't use pseudonyms that sound like the real names they're
based on--so, for instance, don't anonymize the name "Annalee" by using
the name "Leanne." And remember that almost any kind of personal information
can give your identity away--you may be the only one at your workplace
with a particular birthday, or with an orange tabby.
Also, if you are concerned
about your colleagues finding out about your blog, do not blog while you
are at work. Period. You could get in trouble for using company resources
like an Internet connection to maintain your blog, and it will be very
hard for you to argue that the blog is a work-related activity. It will
also be much more difficult for you to hide your blogging from officemates
and IT operators who observe traffic over the office network.
2. Use anonymizing
technologies
There are
a number of technical solutions for the blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.
Invisiblog.com is
a service that offers anonymous blog hosting for free. You may create
a blog there with no real names attached. Even the people who run the
service will not have access to your name.
If you are worried
that your blog-hosting service may be logging your unique IP address and
thus tracking what computer you're blogging from, you can use the anonymous
network Tor
to edit your blog. Tor routes your Internet traffic through what's called
an "overlay network" that hides your IP address. More importantly, Tor
makes it difficult for snoops on the Internet to follow the path your
data takes and trace it back to you.
For people who want
something very user-friendly, Anonymizer.com offers a product called "Anonymous
Surfing," which routes your Internet traffic through an anonymizing server
and can hide your IP address from the services hosting your blog.
3. Limit your audience
Many blogging
services, including LiveJournal, allow you to designate individual posts
or your entire blog as available only to those who have the password,
or to people whom you've designated as friends. If your blog's main goal
is to communicate to friends and family, and you want to avoid any collateral
damage to your privacy, consider using such a feature. If you host your
own blog, you can also set it up to be password-protected, or to be visible
only to people looking at it from certain computers.
4. Don't be Googleable
If you want
to exclude most major search engines like Google from including your blog
in search results, you can create a special file that tells these search
services to ignore your domain. The file is called robots.txt, or a Robots
Text File. You can also use it to exclude search engines from gaining
access to certain parts of your blog. If you don't know how to do this
yourself, you can use the "Robots Text File Generator" tool for free at
Web
Tool Central .
Blog without getting
fired
A handful of bloggers
have recently discovered that their labors of love may lead to unemployment.
By some
estimates, dozens of people have been fired for
blogging, and the numbers are growing
every day.
The bad news is that
in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you've been fired
for blogging. While your right to free speech is protected by the First
Amendment, this protection does not shield you from the consequences of
what you say. The First Amendment protects speech from being censored
by the government; it does not regulate what private parties (such as
most employers) do. In states with "at will" employment laws like California,
employers can fire you at any time, for any reason. And no state has laws
that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or
otherwise.
One way to make sure
your blog doesn't earn you a pink slip is to make sure that you write
about certain protected topics. Most states have laws designed to prevent
employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside
of work, for example. Be warned that laws like this do vary widely from
state to state, and many are untested when it comes to blogging.
1. Political opinions
Many states,
including California, include sections in their Labor Code that prohibit
employers from regulating their employees' political activities and affiliations,
or influencing employees' political activities by threatening to fire
them. If you blog about membership in the Libertarian Party and your boss
fires you for it, you might very well have a case against him or her.
2. Unionizing
In many
states, talking or writing about unionizing your workforce is strongly
protected by the law, so in many cases blogging about your efforts to
unionize will be safe. Also, if you are in a union, it's possible that
your contract may have been negotiated in a way that permits blogging.
3. Whistleblowing
Often there
are legal shields to protect whistleblowers--people who expose the harmful
activities of their employers for the public good. However, many people
have the misconception that if you report the regulatory violations (of,
say, toxic emissions limits) or illegal activities of your employer in
a blog, you're protected. But that isn't the case. You need to report
the problems to the appropriate regulatory or law enforcement bodies first.
You can also complain to a manager at your company. But notify somebody
in authority about the sludge your company is dumping in the wetlands
first, then blog about it.
4. Reporting on
your work for the Government
If you work
for the government, blogging about what's happening at the office is protected
speech under the First Amendment. It's also in the public interest to
know what's happening in your workplace, because citizens are paying you
with their tax dollars. Obviously, do not post classified or confidential
information.
5. Legal off-duty
activities
Some states
have laws that may protect an employee or applicant's legal off-duty blogging,
especially if the employer has no policy or an unreasonably restrictive
policy with regard to off-duty speech activities. For example, 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." These laws have not been tested in a blogging
context. If you are terminated for blogging while off-duty, you should
contact an employment attorney to see what rights you may have.
Blog without fear
Blogs are getting
a lot of attention these days. You can no longer safely assume that people
in your offline life won't find out about your blog, if you ever could.
New RSS tools and services mean that it's even easier than ever search and
aggregate blog entries. As long as you blog anonymously and in a work-safe
way, what you say online is far less likely to come back to hurt you.
Resources
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
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