Rule 8: Respect other people's privacy
Of course, you'd never dream of going through your colleagues' desk drawers. So naturally you wouldn't read their email either.
Unfortunately, a lot of people would. This topic actually rates a separate section. For now, here's a cautionary tale. I call it
The case of the snoopy foreign correspondent
In 1993,
Michael Hiltzik, a highly regarded foreign correspondent in
the Moscow bureau of the
Los Angeles Times, was caught reading his
coworkers' email. His colleagues became suspicious when system
records showed that someone had logged in to check their email at
times when they knew they hadn't been near the computer. So they set
up a sting operation. They planted false information in messages from
another one of the paper's foreign bureaus. Hiltzik read the notes and
later asked colleagues about the false information. Bingo! As a disciplinary measure, he was immediately reassigned to another position at
the paper's Los Angeles bureau.
The moral: Failing to respect other people's privacy is not just bad Netiquette. It could also cost you your job.
Some people in cyberspace have more power than others. There are
wizards in
MUDs (multi-user dungeons), experts in every office, and
system administrators in every system.
Knowing more than others, or having more power than they do, does
not give you the right to take advantage of them. For example,
sysadmins should never read private email.
For more on the abuse of power in the milieu of computer networks, see
"Egregious Netiquette Violations" on
page 83. For more about privacy,
see "Email Privacy: a Grand Illusion?" on
page 125.
Rule 9:
Don't abuse your power
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