All News is “Glocal?” Considerations of Community and Personal Privacy with Global Publication of Local News

ABSTRACT

Community-focused journalists increasingly publish their work for global audiences. This project defines a circle of “community privacy”—the understanding that some information is ethically appropriate for a local population but inappropriate beyond that community. This new consideration of privacy should be used by news organizations and others to accompany traditional considerations of “public” and “private” spheres of life. It provides examples when information needed by local residents was inappropriately handled outside that community. It identifies some practical solutions to this technology-derived problem and argues that local journalists should consider the global implications of what they publish locally about private people.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. The author is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists' ethics committee and participated in the 2014 revision of its ethics code.

Notes

¹ The term “geographic community” or “community privacy” is used to distinguish from “geographic privacy,” a specific term used in the mobile computing industry to describe technology that can identify the physical location of a mobile device in use.

² This is a cultural issue, as other nations (such as Germany and Australia) have much tighter rules related to the public release of information related to people involved in civil and criminal litigation. As Schauer wrote, “conceptions of privacy are themselves culturally constructed, and … a product of widely varying social and cultural understandings” (2003, p. 7).

³ This project also argues that The Courier-Journal’s initial story and tweet over-emphasized Dao’s past, and attributes it to an over-eager reporter and lack of close supervision. Insofar as how it impacts the argument for considerations of geographic privacy, it is worth remembering what the legal community says: Bad cases make bad laws.