From my own experiences in other web forums, the best thing to do is redact personal info anyway with an explicit acknowledgement that the information is public and the redaction is a mere courtesy.
Maybe. But to be honest, I saw no need to redact a public document that I was linking to. I cannot control what information people choose to make available to the public, and I think it's improper for me to try and anticipate what someone would get bent out of shape for, and what someone wouldn't.
For many years, I did not make my physical address public in any way. And that was primarily because people would "dox" me (I don't get the whole new-age online terminology -- you kids and your rock-and-roll). I mean, during the Old BSG v. NuBSG battle, (and actually some other battle), someone decided to post that I was the editor of a church newsletter (the name of the publication was called the Temple Terrace News, because the city -- where Busch Gardens and the University of South Florida is just outside of Tampa, is called Temple Terrace), got my age wrong based on an interview that appeared on TrekToday's old TrekNation site, which somehow got reposted with the different date, and provided what they thought was my home address.
It's very easy to not have a home address out there. Don't put it in public documents. Sure, you can't get away from putting it on a deed. But then, don't use it as a business address for a corporation that you form, once again a public document.
The over-sensitivity to addresses is quite new. Yet, it's funny that to really get an address, all you have to do is type in a person's name and the city you believe they are in, and more often than not, their address is the first thing that pops up. Hell, it's how I remember my dad's address. =P
In the context of the discussion, the address was not relevant so you should have left it out. Think of it more like spoiler/NSFW tags, an easily defeated gesture signifying a modicum of sensitivity. Even if it's insincere, it's a good way to cover your ass by pretending to care about the privacy and feelings of the guy whose life you are digging into and exposing.
Maybe, but at the time (and really now, I'm iffy on it), there was no reason to do it. As far as I knew, Peters had this property as a vacation property, like the timeshare he owned immediately previously to it. It was not "homesteaded" that I could see, so he was not using it as a primary residence, as defined by Florida law.
If I knew that he had his "godsons" there as he states, sure, I might have considered sharing the information without links, and possibly offering links only if requested. But I had no information supporting that. I simply had a business, and this was what the business claimed as its corporate address. It was the company's legal address.
But if you look back in the many pages here, people shared corporate information links all over the place, especially when it came to the company that reportedly owned the building Ares Studios is based out of. Why would this be treated different than that? And I was linked directly to a corporate filing.
All my advice is coming from my experiences observing a certain hashtag relating to video games which shall not be named here. Suffice it to say, twitter users' private lives were being exposed by the actual fucking press. Everyone was being doxed and having crazy shit mailed to them, they were fleeing their homes etc.
And I am definitely listening to your advice.
But I am not familiar with the hashtag situation you talked about above. Maybe if you get a chance and can talk to me private (since it might be off-topic here), I'd be happy to review it, and what SPJ weighed in with.
The SPJ actually weighed in on this all this and that's where my advice is coming from. It's due diligence and polite to leave extraneous details out of your reporting if it's not necessary, even if those facts are easily available elsewhere.
I left out a lot of information that I deemed not necessary. But to be honest, it would be a tough discussion to have that would state the listed physical address of a company that is being questioned is not necessary. While you never want to have an over-abundance of information, you don't want anyone to read something you present, and say, "But where is it?" or whatever answer you should've provided in what you presented.
And I'm not even saying you did anything explicitly wrong. Just sub-optimally for this new, crazy, connected world. What you did could have been done better, and you ought to learn from it moving forward.
Fair enough, really. But I'm no stranger to having to balance what should be public and what should be private. And still, it comes down to the fact that I was asking about a corporation that had minimal information available, except for who was listed as its registered agent and its principal, as well as a corporate address. I didn't repeat the corporate address, but it was included in the public documents that discussed the company.
There were a lot of posts....and now I can't go back and search.
