[okfn-discuss] Emails on IsItOpen

Sat Feb 20 14:05:21 UTC 2010

I only just realised this might be a problem.

When mailing IsItOpen the email of the recipient appears in clear - this
could be scraped by bots. This is different from WhatDoTheyKnow where there
is an official FOI officer - here there is often only an assumed personal
contact (i.e. it may not be the right person to send to). Sending public
emails to arbitrary individuals might cause them public embarrassment,
especially when they might simply be an arbitrary contact. For some of the
organizations we are likely to write to the request itself may be seen as
confrontational. These organizations may well not have an official contact
of any sort and also where there is one it's of the form help at foo.org which
probably isn't going to get a reply. (In a sense when we get friendly
addresses to write to the problem will have gone away).

I suspect that we should allow the email to be hidden (otherwise we are
effectively publishing people's emails without permission). But I'm not an
expert here. It may be useful to list the role of the person (e.g. Editor of
Fooics).

So far I have only sent emails to friendly recipients

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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