There’s a big reaction to Techcrunch at the moment, after they publicly stated they had received confidential Twitter documents sent to them by a hacker who had got access to Twitter bosses email accounts.
The arguments by Mike Arrington are that the information will appear anyway, that the unethical behaviour was by the hacker and not themselves, and previous articles by the Wall Street Journal and Gawker, along with Techcrunch.
And they’ve said they won’t post highly sensitive or personal data – simply the product notes and financial projections.
Interesting timing considering the current investigations into allegations of mobile phone hacking by the News of the World.
The question I’m thinking about are:
Whether it’s morally/legally right to say that a publication is absolved of an ethical decision because documents ‘land in our inbox’?
Does it matter whether you proactively obtain, or simply receive, information if the end result is the same publication of material?
And whether the financial projections and product notes of a private internet technology company could be judged to be ‘in the public interest‘ or not.
Really interested to hear some other opinions/knowledge of the legalities – all my notes/reference books are at home!