response 333 of 424:

Jan 30 23:52 UTC 2004

> Date: 29 Jan 2004 05:45:09 -0000
> From: valerie@unixmama.com
> To: xxxxxxxxxxxx@cyberspace.org
> Subject: a request  

> Hello.  I'm writing with a request that is very important to me.
> I deleted my online baby diary from Grex.  There is a vote that has
> just started, to undelete it, against my wishes.  Please, even if
> you haven't used Grex in a long time, I urge you to log in and vote   
>to leave the baby diary deleted.  The vote also includes John Perry's
> divorce diary, which I deleted at his request, and which he wishes
> to also stay deleted.  I encourage you to log in and vote to leave all
> these items deleted.  My baby diary items contain lots of personal
> information about me and my children that I no longer wish to be
> posted on the Internet.  Even if my items are restored without my
> postings, my baby diary items are still all about me and my children,
> and the other people's postings are full of my personal information
> that I no longer wish to have posted.
>
> Here are the details of what happened: Back in 1997, I started
> keeping an online baby diary on Grex, logging many personal details
> of pregnancy, the births of my children, and many details of raising
> them, and about my personal life.  I originally posted it because
> I thought people who hadn't experienced pregnancy and childbirth
> might be interested to read about these things.  I figured that
> since it was located in a back corner of Grex, the only people who      
> would wade through my baby diary were people who were interested
> enough in parenting to wade through hundreds of postings about messy
> diapers and other topics of interest only to people who were truly
> interested in parenting issues, and also to people who were very
> patient friends of mine who wanted to keep up with my life.
>
> A few weeks ago, I discovered that a parody of my baby diary had
> been running on M-Net for the past 2 1/2 years, without my knowledge.
> (If you would like to see it, it's item 39 in the "Agora" conference
> on M-Net.)  Some of the postings there are funny, some are nasty.
> Finding the parody explained a lot about why the real baby diary
> had, in the past 2 1/2 years, acquired a number of people who didn't
> really seem to be interested in parenting, as you could tell by
> their postings.  They were visiting my baby diary to acquire
> material to parody on M-Net, or better yet to post my words verbatim
> and laugh about how outrageous or personal the information was.      
> The rules of the parody game in M-Net's Agora conference say that
> anything posted anywhere on Grex is open to parodying.  There is
> no way to opt out of being parodied.  That is, if you post anything
> on Grex, the people in M-Net's Agora conference take it as an open
> invitation to parody you.  I wished to opt out.  So I deleted my
> baby diary.  I used my Grex staff access to do it, just as I would
> have done for any user of Grex who asked staff to delete an item that
> was full of his or her personal information that they no longer wanted
> to have online.
>
> When I deleted the baby diaries, someone started a discussion
> in the co-op conference, claiming that my deletion of the baby
> diaries was "root abuse".  User jp2 started a vote, this vote that
> I am writing to you about, to undelete the baby diaries.  His
> reasoning is that since there were other people's words in the baby
> diaries, he claims it was censorship for me to delete their words    
> without their permission.  I find this claim bizarre.  The information
> in those baby diaries is all about me and my children.  If someone
> else had posted my credit card numbers, it would clearly be appropriate
> to delete that posting, because it contained my personal information.
> Most of the postings in the baby diaries are likewise all about my
> personal information.  I no longer wish to have this personal
> information online.
>
> So, if you would log in to Grex and vote "no" on proposal "A",
> I would very much appreciate it.
>
> To vote, log in to Grex, and, type    !vote    from a menu, or
>    vote    from a shell prompt.  Then follow the menus from there.
>
> -Valerie