The asshole bar is raised again

A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.

The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.

Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.

You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.

There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.

Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolff?

Do what I say, not what I do: I first gave the “information wants to be free” speech 12 years ago. And I actually gave it because Patrick Spain and I had started to talk. […] This was 12 years ago, and I gave this speech and everybody said no, no, no. You’re crazy, content is king and if you have it you’re blah, blah, blah. Well, we all know that they were wrong, that I was right, or if not me then Patrick was right, and I was his instrument.