The urge, especially when someone does something nasty, to bitch about them online whether on one’s own blog, on a site such as juicycampus.com, in comments to some article or somewhere else entirely can be very hard to resist.

I’m not entirely certain whether it’s a good idea though even leaving aside the legal issues: possible defamation, incitement to violence, hate speech etc. It isn’t as though once you’ve vented your feelings, you’ve vented them and that’s the end of the story: what you say could come back to haunt you years later. Search engines have particularly unforgiving memories and unless you have have a name like ‘Mary Smith’ which you share with a million other people, all it is ever going to take for someone to dig up what you’ve said (assuming you haven’t said it anonymously) is a thirty second search online, not a thirty-month long search at the archives of twice as many publications.

An example Daniel J. Solove gave in his book ‘The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet‘ was of a man who’d written about his ‘brush with the law’ at the age of seventeen had it follow him for the rest of his life whether at job interviews or on dates despite the fact that, officially, his record was unavailable.

I’ve come to believe that whenever one gives out personal information online, even if it is entirely in the form of a vindictive rant, it constitutes an invasion of one’s own privacy and while it certainly is sometimes productive such as when you want a company to honour a guarantee it’s made to you and your bitching online leaves them worried about their reputation being damaged, I’m not sure it’s often advisable.