• Elise@beehaw.org
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    8 months ago

    I once had a serious fight with a friend about what constitutes public data.

    She looked one of her medical providers up on social media, and found out he was into bdsm or some such, and it upset her.

    I felt it was wrong what she had done. It’s his private life and has nothing to do with his work including his work with her. Whereas she saw it as public data that is totally OK to access for anyone.

    Just because I post something here doesn’t mean it’s socially acceptable to look me up. And if you do at least hide it because it’s creepy af.

    • possibly a cat@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      A faux pas, but I’d say it’s still public data. My thoughts are: We can have legitimate reasons to want to do a quick background check on someone, but we can’t control what results pop up. And when we chose to let our data be public, that’s exactly what happens - it appears in search results.

      What we can do is not click on the links that will tell us more than we ought to know. (Assuming the title alone doesn’t do it.) We can also choose not put our entire lives on the internet, though… Interesting story!

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      i think if you post it online on anything other than a DM, you are consenting for it to be public.

      you dont want people to know, don’t post it. its even in most platforms TOS…

      • notTheCat@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Agreed, people get surprised their public data is public, I pretty damn well know my profile pic could end up on everyone’s phone the moment I set it as profile pic