BBC Says It May Contact Your Boss If You Post Comments It Finds Problematic
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There is no automatic right to anonymity when posting on someone else's website. If you post something publicly, surely the expectation is that you're fine with anyone seeing it. If the BBC chooses to share that with your boss, why is it different to anyone else choosing to share it with a member of the public.
If you don't want everyone to know that you're a dick, don't be a dick in public.
If it's somebody posting from home in their own time, dobbing them in seems a bit weird. How do they know who I work for?
I don't know what the status of private communications with the BBC would be in this regard, but if you're using their platform to publish, then I think that my argument holds.
Think of it like this: If I'm a web developer and I haven't received payment for my services I can withhold those services or even retain control of the product I am providing or use the courts to enforce the contract, but if I used the client's credit card info to enforce fines and pay myself I have broken the law regardless of whether I put it in the contract.
However, if the publisher you sent the book to publishs it, then goes to your boss with the intent of getting you in trouble and/or fired, you might have something to sue over.
Otherwise the BBC would quickly find that when they are late paying the contractors who work on their website their credit cards mysteriously get charged for the services rendered.
I assume you never did something embarrassing in a bar? Or were more than a little drunk?
If you'd like to add, "tattling to your employer" to that list I suggest you talk to parliament. They get awfully upset when you try to "do things for them" via cellophane business contracts.
The answer is that there are existing federal statutes in place to allow this. They are controversial and often challenged. Tow truck drivers operate in a grey area of the law and are frequently found to be in violation of the law. I would hope that the BBC values their operating license more than my local tow company.
Put another way, anyone who posts anything on your site, you have a right to discover the name of. Do you agree with this satement? Do you agree that YCombinator, owner of the site you are posting this on, has a right to investigate and discover your name? (Which you are not posting under.)
For me, I would think that would be the case if you cross a certain line. They do not have the right to discover that you're actually (celebrity investor) and then, since of course you have "no right to anonymity", publish the fact that (celebrity investor) comments here.
I think this example logically proves that in fact you do have a right to post anonymously. (Since if you didn't, sites would have a right to go to any length to discover your identity.) Or what am I missing? I might have a flaw in the deduction made in this comment and am open to someone pointing it out.
"Where the BBC reasonably believes that you are or may be in breach of any applicable laws"
They are actually reaching out to claim you have violated laws. Is this not potentially libelous?
But what is the legal status of the threat itself, not carried out?
If there are no legal ramifications from merely threatening to perpetrate tortious interference, then it seems like a useful troll deterrent tool that the BBC has a right to use on their own site.
If you have a problem with service and complain to a manager, then you're clearly not a "third party"; the contract between the employee and fast food restaurant has everything to do with serving you.
Note that the BBC are not saying that they will contact your employer only if it can be determined that you used the employer's time and equipment to post the comments. Even if you post those comments using your own residential internet connection on your own time, they threaten to contact your employer.
> We reserve the right to use or share information in order to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Japan Today Terms of Use, or as otherwise required by law.
The difference is that unlike Japan Today, and other privacy policies mentioned elsewhere on this page, the BBC is trying to tell you whom the information will be disclosed to, pursuant to the guidelines from the U.K. Information Commissioner on privacy policies, but somewhat ineptly. Japan Today tells you that it may "share information", but nothing whatsoever about whom that is likely to be with. The BBC is trying to tell you whom it is likely to be sharing information with.
And it should come as no surprise that if you are posting from a work computer, one of the people it is going to be sharing the information with is the company that your IP address backtracks to.
All parties are invited to remember, one guy's considered opinion is another guy's hate speech.
And then, ever so often, the wind changes, the tables are turned, those in the wrong are now in the right, and those in the right are now everybody's laughing stock.
Who defines the standards? In this case, the BBC.
Why do there need to be "standards of acceptability" at all? Seems to me the better world is one in which people don't interfere in other people's employment.
Proving real damage to the BBC due to what they perceive to be "hate speech" is difficult.
The BBC has put in their terms that they reserve the right to cause real financial harm to those they perceive to be writing "hate speech".
I can put in my contract that I reserve the right to murder you, and if you sign it I'm still going to jail. Such is the case here. The BBC just made themselves look like idiots for no enforceable reason.
BUT: Considering the stuff I see people posting online, I do think it's such a cesspool of hatred, ill-will and really bad arguments that I am concerned how societies will continue to function, if these interactions become a routine part of civic society.
In the past, your opinions, and statements were moderated by your peers, i. e. friends, family, or even strangers (but face-to-face). Sure, that meant a certain degree of self-censorship in some cases. But apart from some anarchists notion of "free speech", I have yet to see anything good emerging from the cauldron of freedom (see /r/the_donald for reference).
Anonymously posting hate-filled comments or fake conspiracies is probably legal, but that doesn't mean it's good. It has real costs, both in how it may hurt those it wants to hurt, as well as the toll it has taken on the political narrative. There needs to be a mechanism to include the author in the fallout from his comments.
The best I can think of would be connecting posts to the author's Facebook profile. If your friends all see the stuff you write at bbc.co.uk, you'll be a bit more circumspect in what you say.
Generally, posts that the author would be ashamed of if their mother read them are probably something we can do without.
Ideally, we should come up with a mechanism that respects the idea that we all have multiple public personas, i. e. it's completely legitimate to ask a question on a sexual health forum but you still don't want your family to see it. But these 'personas' shouldn't be license to act without taking responsibility for the consequences.
I'm not sure I think this idea of the BBC's is a bad idea.
There is a grey area of behaviour that cannot be pinned down with a blunt instrument like criminal law. These behaviours have traditionally been handled by the people witnessing them, and with an equally large spectrum of instruments from just a frown to social exclusion, etc.
So, to directly answer your question: nobody and everybody. By letting the people you actually interact with on a day-to-day basis know what you're writing online, the mechanisms of social control continue to function as they always have.
"the BBC may use your personal information to inform relevant third parties such as your employer, school email/internet provider"
If your comment was what they intended, they would have just referred to "e-mail provider".
Compare Google's Privacy policy:
> We will share personal information with companies, organisations or individuals outside Google if we have a belief in good faith that access, use, preservation or disclosure of the information is reasonably necessary to:
> + meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
> + enforce applicable Terms of Service, including investigation of potential violations.
Or Facebook's:
> We may also access, preserve and share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to: detect, prevent and address fraud and other illegal activity; to protect ourselves, you and others, including as part of investigations; or to prevent death or imminent bodily harm.
Or Apple's:
> We may also disclose information about you if we determine that disclosure is reasonably necessary to enforce our terms and conditions or protect our operations or users.
Or Reddit's:
> We may share information if we believe your actions are inconsistent with our user agreements, rules, or other Reddit policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others;
Ironically, the BBC is somewhat clearer about whom the information might end up being disclosed to.
I sure hope that's legal!
Having run a publicly facing messageboard for many years (no auth, just plain old "write what you want (within reason"), we were able to effectively keep the level of spam and abuse off the site with cultural norms within the user base.
In one case, we had someone specifically trolling people on the site. We were able to track the poster back to a particular university in Ireland who we notified via their abuse channel (abuse@domain.xxx I think) with a very generic query:
"we're seeing someone from your network posting crap like this <link to content>. can you investigate?"
The behaviour stopped pretty quickly afterwards...
Turns out most network operators want to run a network that benefits all it's users. If you abuse that privilege, they have no qualms with disconnecting you!!
I know that I know very little about U.K. law, so I would appreciate if someone there could answer:
- Do employers typically have law-enforcement duties?
- Is there a legal presumption of innocence---until proven otherwise---as there is in the U.S.?
- Besides TV Licenses, is the BBC a judicial entity?
I'm just trying to understand why the BBC may notify a non-law-enforcement agency about a possible violation of law.
Well, they are journalists, after all :)
More seriously: these is a ton of stuff that happens that is both completely legal and somewhat bad. In the past, this grey area was policed by the community, using standards such as "politeness" or "etiquette" and sanctions such as "no longer inviting that idiot".
A more charitable reading is that this document is a rather ham-fisted way of saying:
We've stated afore that your IP address is one of the pieces of "personal information" that we collect about you. If you ... do this ... then we will use that information to locate and notify the owner of the computers that you are using, or some point in the chain between those computers and us. Be aware that if the owner of the computers that you are using is your school, your employer, your organization, or your Internet service provider, they are likely who is going to be notified and your use of these computers for this purpose will be disclosed to them.
"in breach of any applicable laws" is not quite the same as "problematic", even under the modern sense of "a problem" or "something we don't like".
You can compare to other privacy policies, and note the somewhat ironic fact that other privacy policies are quite woolly and vague about whom personal information will be disclosed to for the purposes of protecting the site, protecting its users, and enforcing terms and conditions of service. For all users know, these companies and organizations could be disclosing it to some randomly selected stranger in a faraway country. The U.K. Information Commissioner has some guidelines for privacy policies, and making it clear what sort of people personal information will be disclosed to is actually a good thing, even though the BBC has been somewhat inept about it.
* https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
Rather than the vague "we may disclose information" of Apple, Reddit, and their ilk, the BBC is trying to point out that the people that it may disclose information to are going to be the people discoverable from things like looking up one's IP addresses, which is going to include employers if one posts to the BBC site from company computers, schools if one does so from school computers, and so forth.
This story reminded me of Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen trying to get an anti-Trumper fired from her position at a bank by outing her to her boss. (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/5/15/15640534/r...)
If a person speaks illegally on a forum, then the right move would be to contact law enforcement. But if the action falls below law enforcement, then apparently the BBC has its own enforcement wing when it encounters unsavory speech. The oversight? BBC's cold cultural calculations and political acumen. The consequences? Getting someone fired or harassed at work.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/29/contents
Information shared with third party without consent Providing personal details to a family member without consent
Any organisation that stores and uses personal data relating to identifiable living individuals, either on a computer or in a paper filing system, is a "data controller" for the purposes of the DPA. Data controllers are obliged to handle personal data in accordance with the eight data-protection principles set out in schedule 1 to the DPA unless a specific exemption applies. The first principle is that data must be processed fairly and lawfully, which requires any processing (including disclosure) to be done either with the consent of the individual or in order to fulfil legal obligations such as contractual obligations. This disclosure would be a serious breach of privacy.
Whilst most privacy policies do not say whom the data are shared with when it comes to enforcing terms and conditions and protecting the site/its users, the BBC's privacy policy here is. The UKICO guidelines point out that part of fairness is telling people whom data are going to be disclosed to; which the BBC is doing.
If one has a gripe against that, then one has a gripe against everyone, from Reddit to Amazon. Because all of their privacy policies have clauses that say, in one form or another, that personal information is disclosed in order to enforce terms and conditions, and to protect the site/its users. Reddit's and several others' are elsewhere on this page. Here is Amazon's:
> We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property or safety of Amazon.co.uk, our users or others.
Ironically, the BBC is actually attempting to be the best of the bunch. Other people actually do not comply with the UKICO guidelines and make no mention of whom the data are disclosed to in such cases. They just make vague "we disclose data" statements.
This seems to me an attempt to get folks spun up talking about the BBC. Are they hurting for money?
Oh, error 504 gateway timeout. Maybe this article crashed their complaints department.
Frankly, I'm not at all comfortable with a global media outlet reserving the right to try to get people fired in private for internet comments.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/2017/04/17/Huffington-Post-...
We can't even hold media, individual reporters or even public officials to account for posting false stories or false claims.
By all means, delete such comments and ban the offending commenters (or even report them to the police if applicable), but reserving the right to try to get people fired is going too far. Internet vigilante justice is ugly and brutal, and I am not at all comfortable with the BBC getting involved in that game.
Because I've heard people try to construe both as such.
Same thing: the extremes are easy to label. The question is where do you draw the line between showing an ankle or face, and full-out copulation in 4K?
Unfortunately it's not confined to simply "harassment" but anything "offensive, inappropriate or objectionable" by their own wording, which is highly subjective. If there's a legal issue, BBC should contact law enforcement, but beyond that informing others feels entirely punitive.
If anything, this opens up many opportunities of abuse from nefarious and mischief inclined people.
Lesson to take from this is, don't do personal stuff upon work computers period. That should be the take away message about this type of issue. Remember many an employment contract prohibit that and it is often overlooked if not abused, this may just become that abuse nail example you encounter with HR. Let alone the security aspects for you and your employer, your cloud drive getting a malware payload not impossible and vice versa.
Defamation is unlawful and is never investigated nor prosecuted by police.
If it is really that important, the company should just purchase the licenses for their employees, as a perquisite. Then it no longer has the need to police the private lives of its workers, in order to see if they need to be fired for illicit, unlicensed television-watching.
I think the reason this is okay is that notifying a school or employer of your behavior is not the same as persecution.