by Robert Finn
Joel’s tale inspired a lengthy and impassioned discussion related
to privacy on NASW’s mailing lists in particular and the Internet in
general. Point your browser to http://nasw.org/privacy.htm
if you wish to read the full discussion, which I’ve edited into a single
document. There are three senses in which the NASW mailing lists (nasw-talk,
nasw-freelance, and nasw-pr) lack privacy. First, many Internet mavens advise
that any e-mail message be regarded more like a postcard than like a letter
sealed from prying eyes in an envelope. Courts have held that an employer
may read the contents of an employee’s e-mail. Additionally, all network
administrators along the circuitous path typically taken by an e-mail message
can intercept and read it. On top of that there’s little preventing
the intended recipient from copying your message to 500 of his closest friends.
Second, participating in a public mailing list is less like sending a postcard
to a few friends, and more like standing on a soapbox. Each of the mailing
lists has several hundred subscribers, and they’re open to anyone in
the world; subscribers needn’t be NASW members. Even if the lists were
restricted to NASW members, it wouldn’t be safe, for example, to take
an editor’s name in vain, since many editors are NASW members or have
friends who are.
Third, every single message from all three mailing lists is archived at http://nasw.org/lists/. Since each message is a separate web page that we have no plan ever to delete, ten years from now someone could stumble on that (now) embarrassing message you sent last January. Moreover, every word in those pages has been indexed by World Wide Web search engines such as Alta Vista and Lycos. This is how Joel’s former friend found that message.
After many list subscribers weighed in with their opinions on these matters, NASW President Richard Harris made a number of decisions that will take us a few small steps in the direction of increased privacy.
To begin with, we are requesting that Internet search engines bypass all our mailing list archives as they index the web. The standard way of doing that is to insert a file called “robots.txt,” which instructs the “robots” sent by the search engines to ignore certain sections of a web site. This is a simple step to take, but unfortunately it’s not very effective. While all seven of the most popular search engines honor the requests in robots.txt files, the vast majority of other search engines simply ignore them. And while the most popular search engines apparently stopped indexing our archives in mid June, I have no idea when, if ever, they will un-index the thousands of messages they came upon before that.
The only way to ensure that the search engines are unable to index our mailing list archives (aside from eliminating the archives entirely) is to limit access to NASW members who have passwords. That is what we’ve done with the nasw-freelance archive; only NASW members who have obtained a username and password may get into the archive. It’s still possible for anyone in the world to read and post messages to all three of the mailing lists, and the archives of nasw-talk and nasw-pr will remain open, at least for now.
Why restrict only one archive? Subscribers felt that nasw- freelance
is where they want to engage in particularly sensitive discussions. We regularly
talk over the terms of a specific magazine’s contract, for example,
or we address payment policies.
While these steps have made the NASW mailing lists somewhat more private,
participants need to be aware that we’ve only tackled the third of
the three senses in which NASW mailing lists lack privacy. Nevertheless,
at the same time that we recognize that the lists are public forums, I hope
we can maintain the lists’ essential nature, which I still find to
be delightfully uninhibited.