[knowtheory]

Hey Reg, I'm curious to what extent you believe that private citizens have a right not to be reported on. If Annie Lowrey had decided to interview Reg Braithwaite and couldn't get a hold of you, if she'd pursued a similar course of action, would it have been intrusive?

I get that having made something public once does not necessarily mean that one opens their life up to scrutiny forever and ever, but to what extent does closing down one's works and leaving the public eye entitle one to a lack of scrutiny/inquiry?

(As an entirely meta aside, I'd be curious to what extent the cultural divide over privacy ethos between Canadians and Americans is at play here. My impression, at least with my wife's Canadian family, and our collective friends, have different expectations from the Americans i grew up with.)

[thaumaturgy]

I realize that your comment was directed entirely to raganwald, but while people here are pondering to what extent private people should be reported on, nobody seems to be considering why someone might want to remain private, and how becoming public might affect them.

I write a monthly column for a local newspaper and occasionally give local talks and so on. Once in a while someone I've never met recognizes me, which at the moment is both neat and a little unsettling. Within about a 10 mile radius of my adopted home town, I'm no longer an entirely private person. One of my clients' more curious sons tracked down my contact information -- it wasn't very hard to do, but it was a personal first.

The problem is that, as a private individual, I have made decisions that are nuanced and not easily explained in three sentences. They are decisions that would be polarizing to others; if they became public, it could do a lot of damage.

I have family members and friends to consider. I am rarely entirely anonymous anymore, so I rarely get to talk about some subjects that I would dearly love to talk about. Part of my thought process behind every comment I leave on HN now is, "What if one of my clients read this?"

We have no idea what _why's personal life looks like. We have no idea what his motivations are behind wishing to remain private. It is entirely possible -- I would even say likely -- that he has very good reasons for wishing to remain private, which are known only to him and perhaps a couple of other people.

By attempting to treat him as a public figure, or as a private citizen which we have some "right" to report on, we are risking doing real, measurable, and possibly serious harm either to him or to his property or to his life, and all for the sake of nothing more than our own idle morbid curiosity.

I'm quite surprised there are so many people here that are defending that calculus.

[raganwald]

I don’t have a track record of being reclusive, so I wouldn’t be offended by someone persisting a bit. But if it got around that I don’t want to talk to people about something I did, I guess I would be ill at ease if someone pursued me about it.

I’m not saying it’s wrong in some grand or absolute sense, there are going to be some things where a person disapproves without necessarily thinking there should be a law or an absolute, iron-clad, airtight legal definition.

Perhaps the word I should have used—and I apologize for being discourteous to Annie in my remarks—is “discourteous.” Having thought about it and considered the many thoughtful replies here, I think it was discourteous to persist, but not necessarily wrong.