More on the problem of excessive accessibility....In February, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled that Docusearch.com could be held liable for any "foreseeable harm" caused by its disclosure of personal information to paying customers. Last year Liam Youens paid Docusearch $45 to dig up the social security number of his ex-girlfriend. He used the information to find her current place of employment, where he killed her and then killed himself. Docusearch admits to using a technique it calls "pretexting" (which the rest of us call lying), in which it phones various people, pretending to be friends, relatives, or others with a legitimate need for information. Docusearch claims that pretexting is routinely used by police and is lawful. The New Hampshire verdict will be used in an ongoing federal suit by the victim's mother against Docusearch. (PS: This is a disturbing case. I'm still wondering about the question I asked when I first wrote about this case in FOSN for 1/8/02: What if Youens got the social security number from Google? If general search engines can be held liable for disclosing information to stalkers or terrorists, then that's the end of general search engines.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/10/2003 07:42:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
