A good dive below the simplistic surface of public being defined as “outside” or “observable” and the challenges for society to set new ethical standards.
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The phenomenon of doxxing (revealing personal information about a person online) has made clear that public information exists in a context of power and consent, and we must construct our ethics in that context. We can’t do that if we are still pretending that taking information that was merely available and instead making it easily accessible is an act without any moral or ethical consequences.
This is a really interesting point. The article doesn’t go into detail, but the Gawker and Twitter quotes are in relation to a post on Buzzfeed that reprinted several tweets from sexual assault survivors (with permission, as it later turned out). NYMag has an excellent piece on the ensuing fallout here: