Of Privacy and Poop: "Norm Enforcement" Via the Blogosphere
Daniel Solove
By way of BoingBoing comes this fascinating incident in Korea. A young woman’s dog pooped inside a subway train. Folks asked her to clean it up, but she told them to mind their own business. A person took photos of her and posted them on a popular Korean blog. Another blogger, Don Park, explains what happened next:
Within hours, she was labeled gae-ttong-nyue (dog-sh#t-girl) and her pictures and parodies were everywhere. Within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Request for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying as well as her watch, clearly visible in the original picture. All mentions of privacy invasion were shouted down with accusations of being related to the girl. The common excuse for their behavior was that the girl doesn't deserve privacy.
While the girl clearly behaved badly, those Korean netizens' behavior is even worse and inexcusably so. Abuse by the mob is indistinguishable from abuse by dictators yet they just don't see it in the heat of righteousness.
I posted a while ago about how norm enforcers can be valuable in promoting social norms of etiquette and civility. These norm enforcers police norms for free, sometimes even doing so at a cost to themselves. According to the article I discussed, the “tendency to sanction breaches of social norms is the key to human cooperation.”
But norm-enforcement also has a dark underbelly. As Richard McAdams argues, certain norms are unnecessary and undesirable; and even desirable norms can be enforced to an undesirable degree. See Richard H. McAdams, The Origin, Development, and Regulation of Norms, 96 Mich. L. Rev. 338, 412 (1997).
The "dog-sh#t-girl case" involves a norm that most people would seemingly agree to – clean up after your dog. Who could argue with that one? But what about when norm enforcement becomes too extreme? Most norm enforcement involves angry scowls or just telling a person off. But having a permanent record of one’s norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level. The blogosphere can be a very powerful norm-enforcing tool, allowing bloggers to act as a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters.
And that is why the law might be necessary – to modulate the harmful effects when the norm enforcement system gets out of whack. In the United States, privacy law is often the legal tool called in to address the situation. Suppose the dog poop incident occurred in the United States. Should the woman have legal redress under the privacy torts?
Some commentators to Don Park’s blog contend that the behavior of these cyber norm-enforcers is justifiable because that the woman was in public and thus had no privacy:
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Full story here .... A most interesting read of the immediate future change & the possible, "blog regulation" effect, IMHO, society now faces!!! ???
