The Snow Day Phone Message

Be careful when leaving an irate phone message or sending a quickly worded e-mail in a fit of rage, cause you might find it/them appearing in unexpected places.

By now, many will have heard about the Virginia high school senior who left a phone message at a school official's home, asking why a snow day was not called, due to, wait for it, three inches of snow.

The spouse of the school official phoned and left a rather irate message on the senior's cell phone voice mail. Not to be outdone, the senior then decided to upload the spouse's recording, accessible by a link from a Facebook page dedicated to the school official. On the Facebook page, the official's home phone number was also posted. The official and his family then became the unfortunate recipients of numerous harassing phone calls, including during the wee hours of the morning. The media picked up the story and began to make numerous inquiries, resorting to such nefarious tactics as calling the senior's house, who apparently wasn't too fond of his new found notoriety. Thinking that now, enough was enough, the senior quickly reminded the media of the different and substantial issues of the day, which it was neglecting by pursuing this story: i.e. Darfur and the presidential primaries (for indeed the country is in such dire need to talk about the continuing saga of Bill, Hillary, and Barack on the campaign trail).

The senior was partly right, there are more serious things to discuss than hearing the spouse's irate message and the comic relief some derive from it. I'm talking about issues of privacy, expectations of privacy, and not to mention web etiquette, manners, civility, and perhaps due to the lack of respect for all these things, the potential growth of cyber defamation and/or other causes of action.

Did the spouse have some reasonable expectation of privacy that her phone message would/should not have been broadcast throughout the internet? She was after all leaving it on a private voice mail receiving system, and not on public radio. Furthermore, the spouse was a private citizen and not a public figure; she was not seeking to insert herself into some stream of public discourse. Whether the link to the actual phone message was fair game to post, certainly the family's phone number was not.

I have a great deal more sympathy for the spouse and the family on this one. Although, one could argue that the spouse might have strongly considered her words and tone more carefully before leaving the message, considering where they could potentially end up, there really is no excuse for the senior calling the residence to pester the official in the first place. That was "invasion of privacy" #1. #2 was publishing the phone number online accompanied by the spouse's phone message. I think any reasonable person, including a seventeen year old (they are after all one year shy of joining the age of majority and acquiring the right to vote) could forseeably anticipate that the official's house would be bombarded with phone calls in light of the recorded message being posted to elicit ridicule.

Nevertheless, there may be some hard lessons to be learned here. One, anytime you leave a message or send an unflattering e-mail, it may very well come back to haunt you. So choose your words carefully.

Second, there is a great potential for liability in the material we publish online. Those who are not careful might find themselves at the receiving end of a costly lawsuit, and not the type that ends up in small claims court. Indeed, it's a high and costly price to unleash scorn on another person.

Third, we need to be more cautious and conscientious about the impact that our cyber conduct has on others and the damage it may cause. The ability to instantaneously publish verbal refuse or damaging material has outmatched our capability to stop and reflect first.