There is a lot of people in the chat circles who are involved in government work. You tend to have to exercise some caution with what you say on public platforms as a government employee. Although, I find the prospect of anything from a chat session being used against someone in an employment hearing to be so minuscule that it’s probably not worth worrying about.
Eh, I'd be as careful in there as I am on here, anyway. There are more reasonable things to be cautious of than thinking a subpoena's coming your way from something said on here or in Chat.
As one who has never gotten into real-time chat, be it here or IRC or anywhere else -- think the old AOL chat rooms which never had much appeal to me as an AOL user -- this isn't a real concern of mine. I tend to do online stuff on my own schedule and really don't feel the need to participate in things of that nature.
But this makes me wonder about something on a much larger scale. Why do ISPs, platforms, etc., log IP addresses? It seems to me that keeping a record of IP logins just opens them up to a bunch of unwanted legal scrutiny, such as warrants or the aforementioned subpoenas.
There was a case out of Georgia involving the Topix forums several years ago. If anyone doesn't remember Topix, it was an online forum/bulletin board where one could either post as a registered user or a non-permanent username that could be changed with each individual post. Subforums existed for most every community, and a lot of rumors and gossip were posted there. Someone in a Georgia community took exception to something that was posted on Topix, they got a court order for the poster's IP, and legal action followed. I do not remember if it was a civil case or if criminal charges were filed. At any rate, Topix ended up shutting down their community forums sometime after that.
It always occurred to me that if Topix had not logged IP addresses, that whole situation would have been avoided. And I say this as someone whose name got mentioned derogatorily on local Topix boards in more than one community.
If I was running something like that, I wouldn't log IP addresses.
Because if someone tries to hack into the site, you need a record of the IP address they used so you can block the attack.
Because if someone is using multiple accounts abusively, usually the only hard evidence you have of that is their IP address.
Because if you're running a for-profit site, you need to know how often your customers are visiting the site and where they're from, so you can
market to them meet their needs more effectively.
C'mon, H.B., I know you can do the contrarian song and dance better than this. I'm disappointed.
