Privacy

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes


This article focuses on investors, but the privacy issues should 
concern everyone...

=========================

Sites Unmask Online Investors Before They Can Fight Back  

Jason Anders
The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition


Every day, investors crowd online message boards and chat rooms 
to swap thousands of often-scathing messages about companies. 
Most boards allow postings to be made using aliases, adding to the 
no-holds-barred nature of the chatter.  

But with increasing regularity, and relative ease, companies are 
uncovering the identities of their online critics. Most of the time, the 
users have no idea their personal information has been revealed.  

"Usually your name is turned over before you even knew somebody 
had asked for it, and it's too late to fight it," says Lyrissa Lidsky, an 
associate professor at the University of Florida College of Law, who 
has studied lawsuits filed by companies against their online critics.  

Web sites generally won't turn over users' personal information -- 
like names and addresses -- unless faced with a subpoena. But 
such subpoenas are easy to come by, lawyers say, and often 
impossible to fight.  

Silicon Investor (www.techstocks.com), one of the most popular 
stock-chat sites, says it tries to notify users who are the subjects of 
subpoenas, but says it has no commitment to doing so. "It's just not 
practical for us. We would need an entire subpoena staff to handle 
something like that," says Ethan Caldwell, general counsel for 
Go2Net, Silicon Investor's parent.  

Mr. Caldwell says the site receives about one subpoena a day, and 
in "about half" of those cases is able to give users warnings that the 
site is about to turn over their personal information. Since Silicon 
Investor is a subscription-based site, that information includes 
credit-card numbers and billing addresses.  

Mr. Caldwell admits that the warning is often only a few days before 
the information is to be revealed, and may not give people enough 
time to fight the request.  

While it's obviously impossible for a user to fight a subpoena he 
doesn't know exists, it's still difficult to block such a request even if 
given advanced warning. Subpoenas are generally sought at the 
beginning of a civil case that has been filed against "John Doe" 
defendants. Lawyers say courts generally issue subpoenas without 
question, and are reluctant to block such requests so early in a 
case.  

"This is an incredibly tough issue for us. ... Whenever we inform 
someone that there's a subpoena for their information, people 
ultimately think that somebody is going to use this information to 
harass them or intimidate them. Sometimes, I think that's a very 
legitimate fear to have," Mr. Caldwell says.  

He says he has been personally troubled by some of the subpoenas 
he has received from companies -- whom he believes may have 
questionable motives. "I know at times this has a chilling effect on 
speech, and I really think that's tragic. ... But we're in a very difficult 
position," he says. "People sometimes say, 'My anonymity is 
everything, that's why I'm here. Why won't Silicon Investor defend 
me?' But ultimately, people have to be responsible for what they 
say."  

Yahoo! Finance (quote.yahoo.com), a free stock-chat destination, 
doesn't try to notify its users about subpoenas, in part because it 
has no idea who most of its users are. "We don't collect or verify 
personal information, so there's no way we could warn anyone," 
says Mike Riley, senior producer of Yahoo Finance.  

Often, he says, Yahoo turns over an IP address, a sort of digital 
footprint left by computers when they visit Web sites. Companies 
can then use that IP address to track the user back to a particular 
Internet service provider, which can then be subpoenaed to uncover 
the user's identity.  

Internet giant America Online (www.aol.com), on the other hand, is 
widely regarded as among the most user-friendly when it comes to 
handling subpoenas. The service has a longstanding policy of 
giving its users two week's notice before it responds to a subpoena 
for their personal information, so that users have a chance to 
challenge the subpoena. (AOL also has a legal team of about 55 
lawyers, compared with the two attorneys who handle most of 
Silicon Investor's subpoenas.)  

"We just feel like this is the right thing to do. Our users deserve a 
chance to challenge the subpoenas," says Kim McCreery, a 
spokeswoman for the Dulles, Va., online giant.  

Of course, fighting a subpoena means hiring an attorney -- an 
expensive and often futile move, says Blake Bell, an attorney with 
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York. "In most cases, plaintiffs 
are going to be able to get the information they want. A judge is 
going to be reluctant to try the case before it's even clear who the 
anonymous parties are," says Mr. Bell, who runs a Web site, 
CyberSecuritiesLaw (www.cybersecuritieslaw.com), that tracks so-
called cyber libel cases. "Also you have to remember that in many 
cases you may be dealing with someone who isn't that familiar with 
lawsuits." Mr. Bell has represented companies that have sought to 
unmask online investors.  

"The average message-board user just isn't prepared for this," 
agrees Ms. Lidsky, the University of Florida law professor. "If 
someone says, 'I'm going to sue you for a million dollars,' that's 
enough to make most people's hearts stop, and likely enough to 
silence them."  

She says that no matter what the initial motivation may have been 
for a company that brings this type of suit, the cases rarely end up 
as anything other than an effort to silence a critic. "These people 
they're suing don't have any money to pay for damages. There's 
nothing else to sue them for except silence."  

Copyright 1999 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.





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