Information abuse, security and fairness

Question

I was wondering about security and possible abuse of information in connection with emailing followed or tracked forum content and private messaging.
It is easy to forget that all information here is public and privacy is a just a perception. Unlike a real person to person discussion, every information in the forum gets recorded. I therefore think it is unfair of Oracle to allow any forum member to easily automate the copying of forum content outside of OTN. No forum member and neither Oracle have any control about what people do with their emails, or where it might end up because information gets stolen, forwarded to another other site, or abused. At least Oracle should not make it as easy as allowing anyone to automate the copying process and redistribution of data. As a matter of fairness such copying of information should also not be immediately to allow forum members to make corrections.
Perhaps it would be in the best interest to generally disallow the option to email forum content in the user profile. Thanks!

Answer 1

Ah, recall what I said the other day... the features being enabled in the forum software may not necessarily be because of what oracle thinks people need on the public forums, but because of other areas of business where the same software is being used/integrated.  In those cases, as I think Monique said, there have been use cases defined by the business that require such features.
And, it's not really about security.  There's no security risk for Oracle emailing out details of conversations to members who have joined up and subscribed/tracked a thread on the public forums.  Whether the person sees it through email or directly through the website is irrelevant... it's in the public domain.  They're not seeing anything more than they can see publicly anyway.
You said "It is easy to forget that all information here is public and privacy is a just a perception"... but it's not easy to forget.  When you joined the forums you knew what you could already see before joining and you know what you can see after joining... there's no difference except your own private details which are kept private... the public stuff is still public.
There's nothing to stop people from writing code that trawls the pages of the public site and copy information off them as soon as it's posted... which is just what all the search engines do; and nothing to stop people manually copying/pasting information.  That's the poing of it being public.  You can't expect Oracle to try and put measures in place to stop that, and why should they... that's the sort of thing that helps them get up the search engine rankings.  Emailing out content to members is in no way more sinister or whatever, and certainly no less secure.  What do you expect oracle to do?  Lock the forums so it's only privately visible to signed up members? Stop people receiving emails about threads they're interested in, therefore missing out on active conversations because they don't find out it's been updated until a couple of days has passed.  What you seem to be suggesting... "...generally disallow the option to email forum content in the user profile" is certainly not in Oracle's interest, and certainly not in the interest of the people who may want to use the email feature, who would miss out on updates.
Again, no offence intended, but it sounds like your idea of what a public forum should be and how it functions is drastically different from most forums on the internet.