ABSTRACT
Introduction Laws are designed to deliver public safety and privacy and ensure human rights. Ethical and behavioral standards are created to carry out laws and regulations and ensure that fairness, openness, and choice (among other values) are employed in professional endeavors. One problem with using relatively new criteria to judge eligibility, capability, and past behavior is that the law is slow to catch up, and the ethical standards and guidelines that normally follow the law are even slower to develop. Internet vetting, when addressed in the few standards and guidelines where it is mentioned, has been discouraged because of the issues that inexpert collection, assessment, reporting, and adjudication of Internet search results can engender. A review of the most important guidance available is revealing and instructive and shows that this emerging area of standards is at an early stage of development. Blogs, chats, discussion forums, networking sites, game sites, mutual interest groups, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) present a rich panorama of different types of human interaction; varied “ground rules” in access, privacy, and use; and a challenge for those seeking to impose a definitive set of ethical tenets for those involved.
