The Story of New Zealand's Internet

Transcription

Mauricio Freitas – Blogger, Geekzone

“It’s not quite common now, but a few years ago when things were new and all these large companies didn’t have official participation, some employees were quite happy to post about new products, things that were coming next week. We were quite worried about things leaking just before the competition could be taken by surprise – for example, if these guys find out that we are going to release a new plan next week, they might come out with something on Sunday. So we did have cases where large companies contacted us and said, “Can you tell us who posted this and this and this...?”. I have a standard reply now because I got it so often, not lately, but a few years ago almost twice a month – and the standard reply was, “I’m sorry, a privacy act is in force here and we can’t disclose personal information”. But obviously these companies work in telecommunications and they have their ways of finding things. And because everyone is posting from inside the Internet, they can monitor their internal communications. So I know two or three cases where people actually lost their jobs. One of the guys was actually silly because he copied and pasted the post from the Internet to his details of this new product to his post on Geekzone, so that wasn’t hard to figure out who got access to these documents.”