Blogs are like personal telephone calls. They're the perfect tool for sharing your favorite recipe with friends - or for upholding democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss.
If you blog, there are no guarantees you'll attract a readership of thousands. But at least a few readers will find your blog, and they may be the people you'd least want
or expect. These include current employers, coworkers, and professional colleagues; your neighbors; your spouse or partner; your family; and anyone else curious enough to type your name, email address or screen name into Google.
The point is that anyone can eventually find your blog if your real identity is tied to it in some way.
Here are a few simple precautions to help you maintain control of your personal privacy so that you can express yourself without facing unjust retaliation.
Blog Anonymously
The best way to blog and still preserve some privacy is to do it anonymously.
1. Use a Pseudonym and Don't Give Away Any Identifying Details - when you write about your workplace, be sure not to give away telling details. These include things like where you're located, how many employees there are, and the specific sort of business you do.
Also, if you are concerned about your colleagues finding out about your blog, do not blog while you are at work. Period. You could get in trouble for using company resources like an Internet connection to maintain your blog, and it will be very hard for you to argue that the blog is a work-related activity.
2. Use “Anonymous” Technologies
- There are a number of technical solutions for the blogger who wishes to remain anonymous.
If you are worried that your blog-hosting service may be logging your unique IP address and thus tracking what computer you're blogging from, you can use the anonymous network to edit your blog. It routes your Internet traffic through what's called an "overlay network" that hides your IP address.
3. Use Ping Servers -
If you want to protect your privacy while getting news out quickly, try using ping servers to broadcast your blog entry for you. Pingomatic http://www.pingomatic.com is a tool that allows you to do this by broadcasting to a lot of news venues at once, while making you untraceable.
4. Register Your Domain Name Anonymously -
Even if you don't give your real name or personal information in your blog, people can look up the WHOIS records for your domain name and find out who you are. If you don't want anyone to do this, consider registering your domain name anonymously.
Blog Without Getting Fired
A handful of bloggers have recently discovered that their labors of love may lead to unemployment. By some estimates, dozens of people have been fired for blogging, and the numbers are growing every day.
The bad news is that in many cases, there is no legal means of redress if you've been fired for blogging. And the are no state laws that specifically protect bloggers from discrimination, on the job or otherwise.
Most states have laws designed to prevent employers from firing people who talk openly about their politics outside of work, for example. Be warned that laws like this do vary widely from state to state, and many are untested when it comes to blogging.
1. Political Opinions
- Many states, including California, include sections in their Labor Code that prohibit employers from regulating their employees' political activities and affiliations, or influencing employees' political activities by threatening to fire them.
2. Unionizing
- In many states, talking or writing about unionizing your workforce is strongly protected by the law, so in many cases blogging about your efforts to unionize will be safe.
3. Whistleblowing
- Often there are legal shields to protect whistleblowers - people who expose the harmful activities of their employers for the public good. However, many people have the misconception that if you report the regulatory violations or illegal activities of your employer in a blog, you're protected. But that isn't the case. You need to report the problems to the appropriate regulatory or law enforcement bodies first.
4. Reporting on Your Work for the Government
- If you work for the government, blogging about what's happening at the office is protected speech. Obviously, do not post classified or confidential information.
5. Legal Off-Duty Activities -
Some states have laws that may protect an employee or applicant's legal off-duty blogging, especially if the employer has no policy or an unreasonably restrictive policy with regard to off-duty speech activities.
Blogs are getting a lot of attention these days. You can no longer safely assume that people in your offline life won't find out about your blog. New RSS tools and services mean that it's even easier than ever to search blog entries. As long as you blog anonymously and in a work-safe way, what you say online is far less likely to come back to hurt you.
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