There’s nothing unusual about that. Some laws grant rights, some impose restrictions.

Privacy laws add restrictions on use of personal data. Current implementations in the EU just restrict the processing, specifically the organized, electronic processing. Thus it applies only to the admission question if the university puts the googled data in a database or other organized filing system. And it doesn’t mess with any normal fair use rights.

But the concept is clear, even if personal data is public, its use can be restricted because of privacy concerns.

And again it is not the reading of public data that is/should be restricted by privacy concerns. It is the use. So if someone has a public blog, anyone can read it. And some laws enable things that you can do with that information, and some laws restrict what you can do with that information. The same with ethics. Some things you can do with that information is perfectly ethical, some things are not.

And, most importantly, privacy concerns don’t stop when personal information has become public in one situation. If you transfer personal information to another situation, i.e. from a public blog to a college admission process, it is common to recognize that that personal information is subject to privacy concerns.

And the normal way to deal with that is to inform the person and ask for his consent and if neccesary give the opportunity to update and/or correct the information.

Somehow I do think that anyone knows there’s something amiss with googling, because I’ve heard of a lot of people doing it, but I’ve never seen it as part of a procedure, or publicly stated.

I don’t think anyone is consciously trying to argue that. I think that some people are not aware of what their arguments about reaidng someone’s work being a breach of privacy imply about any stranger reading someone else’s blogs, or other websites.

According to wikipedia:

While academic achievement is important, ultimately colleges are looking for applicants who will be a positive force in all aspects of college life.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_admissions#Factors_in_admissions

Engels – I think you are making the same argument in reply to me that I made in comment 4. Or, if not the same, at least a similar one.

Sorry, Tracy, I hadn’t read all your comments. I think then that you are under a misunderstanding if you are expecting people here to argue that all individual blogs are private and should not be read by anybody. I don’t think that’s what most people are saying. The issue which matters to me is applications decisions, which Harry raised on a previous thread. If you’re looking for someone to defend Randy Cohen to the death, I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong guy.

That said, engels, if I’m eccentric in finding such behaviour wrong, and finding it an advantage of some practice that it would inhibit it, well, that’s bizarre.

Let’s try a different angle. Here’s some quotes from an old EU document about privacy on the internet that describes the same sort of principles but as a basis for law instead of ethics.

The fact that you make something public on the internet doesn’t alter the fact that an organization that collects personal information must respect your privacy.
—-
Publications and directories

The Working party has reiterated that European data protection legislation applies to personal data made publicly available, and that those data still need to be protected.—-
The publication of personal data on the Internet might lead to further processing of the data which the data subject might not expect. Articles 10, 11 and 14 of Directive 95/46/EC (The data protection directive) stipulate in this respect that the data subject has the right to be informed about the usage of his/her personal data.—-
The data protection directive

The general directive states that personal data must be collected fairly, for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes, and be processed in a fair and lawful manner in accordance with those stated purposes.
Processing must take place on legitimate grounds such as consent, contract, law or a balance of interests. Furthermore, the individual has to be informed about intended processing which also includes transmission to third parties before that transmission takes place, and given the right to object to the processing of their personal data for direct marketing purposes. The data subject must also have the right to access the data related to him/her and to rectify, erase or block these data.

You would not eat somebody’s left shoe without consent and a good sharp knife. You should eat a raisin similarly.

Discuss, with reference to forks.

And hope.

Harry, your duty as admissions tutor is, possibly within certain practical constraints, to select candidates based on merit (and possibly to pursue certain limited social goals, such as diversity). It is not a license for you to pursue a personal crusade against a laundry list of social ills of your own choosing and I find it quite bizarre that you think it might be. And this reasoning takes no account of the effects of your actions on the careers of individuals, whom you would be effectively proposing to treat as means for pursuing your goals.

Let us lay aside the issue of university and job applications for a while, and consider other examples. Say I was looking for a guest speaker for my tramping (hiking for non-Kiwis) club

Tracy – I think there are, as in many of these issues, a spectrum of cases, from ones where the values of fairness and equality of opportunity predominate to others whether the value of freedom of association does. Admissions tutors clearly have duties of fairness which club secretaries and dinner party hostesses do not.

It’s mainly an intuition, but I do think it’s unethical to use anything about someone’s behavior at 14 to decide on college admissions. The courts don’t disclose juvenile criminal records, presumably because people change a lot in their teenage years, and shouldn’t be branded for live because of a youthful mistake. Can’t college admissions officers treat their applicants with the same deference that our society extends to youthful criminals?

No, that isn’t a breach of privacy either. Who says that information someone makes publicly-available about themselves should only be used in a way according to the intent and with the consent of the person supplying the personal information? Such a rule would close off a lot of debate (restricting it only to people who put up ideas that they intended to be debated, and not people who intend their ideas to be taken as the gospel truth), it would reduce people’s ability to protect themselves from scammers, it would reduce people’s ability to create new and innovative knowledge built on other people’s experiences, it would reduce people’s abilities to form views about the strengths and weaknesses of their fellow human beings if those views differ from those of the person themselves.

Copyright law explicitly allows use of someone’s work without permission for the purposes of criticism or parody. This means that it’s settled law that anything you publish may be used in ways you did not intend and without your consent.

Look, I can see reasons in some situations such as university applications not to go looking for people’s postings on websites, etc. Breach of privacy ain’t one of them.

Of course it depends on your view of privacy, but this is not an uncommon usage.

No matter how many people view privacy that way it’s still a bad view.

we’ve got people who ask for applications with lots of information, but then go snooping around in (yes, public) fundamentally personal information. THere’s a reason you don’t ask for htat stuff in the application; you’d be embarrassed to do so, becuase you know it’s irrelevant.

Or you asked for the information on the application form but are not confident the applications would honestly provide it.

Reading the information is not the breach, it is collecting information and acting on it in a way that is not according to the intent, and not with the consent of the person supplying the personal information, that is the breach of privacy.

Of course it depends on your view of privacy, but this is not an uncommon usage.

The consequence of this usage is that you have to acquire the consent of the applicants before collecting personal information about them. And that is not exactly a high bar to set.