Online media should stop privacy invasion

The online media has the advantage of enabling the free flow of information at high speed and at low cost. Websites and bloggers in China are using this to expand their influence and reap profits. Yet in their fierce competition to grab the attention of Web browsers, they seem to have ignored the fact that there should be a limit to the kind of information they put out and spread online.

A recent case has shown that websites do not bother to ask themselves if the information they put online should be made public in the first place. On Nov 16, a thread titled "All you need to know about the 50 beauties at Nanchang University" was posted on www.mop.com, one of China's biggest interactive entertainment portals. It provided names, photographs, ages, subjects of study, addresses, phone numbers and online chatroom IDs of the girls at the university.

Within two days, the thread appeared on the front pages of major websites and stayed there for quite some time. It gained more than 100,000 hits the first day it was posted on Tianya, a major Chinese online forum. It also ranked No 3 as the most searched for topic on the Baidu search engine this week.