Thank you for your views. I value your opinions

It is interesting and highly coincidental to note that the same day and after I had made the first posting on this topic, I recelved the Journal of One Name Studies (Jan-Mar 2002) in the post and the Editor, Roy Stockdill, comments exactly on this same topic!!

He titles his comments "Enough of this paranoia over privacy"!!

He writes "I think we have become paranoid about so-called privacy... "

He writes on censorship: "It seems to me there is already far too much censorship in the world and it is not the role of the genealogist and historian to add to it..."

He adds: "Freedom of information and freedom of expression for all is one of the bastions of democracy but in a sense this comcept is diametrically opposed to that of the right to individual privacy and the two make uneasy bedfellows."

He also writes on living people.."There appears also to be a curious belief among some folks that you cannot publish data on the living without their consent. As far as my reading of the DPA (Data Protection Act) goes this is just not so. It might be polite to ask permission but I am not aware of any restriction on publishing information on living people, provided it's accurate and especially when it is already in the public domain"

He concludes: " Were it some kind of offence to publish information about the living there would never have been a decent biography of any famous living person written within the last 100 years"

So it would seem that there really is no legal issue at all relating to the publishing of information of the living or the dead.

The issue only seems to be one of moral and ethical diplomacy.

How do others feel?

Elizabeth, Australia