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Pastimes : The Perils and Pitfalls of Investing With "Friends" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (203)	10/29/2004 1:40:50 PM
From: SI Dave	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 377

>>I believe this case clearly falls in line with SI's obligation to protect, as history of protecting, its members from stock scammers and nuisance advertizers, and the verbally offensive (in some cases.) That obligation belongs first to the member/investor/benefactor. You know.... caveat emptor? If you (speaking generically) didn't hold yourself accountable to report it, how can you hold SI responsibile to know about it, much less review and possibly act upon it? This is a copy/paste of some comments I made to someone else: Private messages are not public threads, anymore than private emails are. If anything, private messages are closer to email than public posts in how they are used and treated. I think there have been two incidents where users asked me to login to their account to view a PM, and those were cases of harassment. As a matter of practice, I don't look at PM's, nor do I want to as a matter of principle. I don't think SI ever has viewed PM's without cause; at least I hope that's the case. So, given those paradigms of privacy, the contents of PM's are not held to the same standards as public messages, particularly if the complainant is a willing participant and is not participating out of duress or coercion. >>And make no mistake, I am hereby reporting it. Sorry, but too late. Besides, even knowing what I've read here, I'm not entirely sure that there would have been justification of administrative intervention in the matter. As far as I can see, these were private dialogs between parties know to each other, did not occur on public threads, and were not a mass solicitation to random, unknown parties. Given that set of circumstances, the right to privacy wins out.