I once asked a very similar question at a conference, where the keynote was discussing their research project into their grandfather's wartime love letters to his wife. It was a very, very intimate history, and struck me as interesting as on one hand, who better than their descendant to give consent, but on the other, the historian in question might be expected to care more about their relatives' feelings about having their personal histories shared with the world. My question, in essence, was 'do you think they'd mind you doing this?', and it was somewhat telling that the response made it clear that the speaker hadn't actually considered this previously. They said, to paraphrase, 'do we ever particularly care about whether our subjects would mind?' For a lot of historians, in other words, the kind of ethics questions that consume social scientists aren't really discussed or considered, even when maybe they should be.

I know that in my own research, I've deliberately avoided developing ties with descendants of my subjects (there is a fairly active commemorative community) for this very reason - I occasionally need to mention nasty things about individuals, and I doubted that I could do so if I knew people who it might hurt. But that's less a concern about privacy, more an acknowledgement that discussing individuals can have ramifications for history writing even many decades later after everyone involved is dead. With the so-called memory boom since the 1990s, and the growth in family history and genealogy, people are simply much more concerned about their own histories than they used to be, and historians need to be mindful about how they deal with that. I don't necessarily think there's a need for a blanket approach delineating what's right and wrong, it's just a balance historians need to strike for themselves. This, I believe, is the intent behind the rule here - acknowledging that it's better to be cautious in an online forum with a very large, public user base, compared perhaps to a scholarly publication.

It's worth noting that to some extent, individuals (and by extension their descendants) do have control over the primary source material about them that is available to historians after they die. Either it's already a matter of public record (eg a letter they wrote to the newspaper), or they or their family arranged for their personal effects/papers to become available for consultation, such as by donating them to an archive. There is no compulsion to do this, and many famous individuals and their families have chosen to keep such archives private or tightly controlled. A lot of government records that contain personal information are generally sealed for quite a long time (in the UK, for instance, information surrounding individuals colelcted in the census is sealed for one hundred years after collection). But this only covers certain types of information gathered in certain ways, and I've certainly found it possible to collect highly personal information in government archives.

Contemporary history is where the real ethics conundrums come in though, particularly when it comes to data collection from living subjects. There was a well-known fiasco a few years ago surrounding an oral history project on the Northern Irish Troubles conducted by Boston College, which collected interviews with key Loyalist and Republican players that were only to be released upon their deaths. Problem turned out to be - predictably - that not every interviewee died at the same time, and the first interviews that were released contained some explosive allegations. These, in turn, have since been used by the police to try and prosecute living figures (most famously Republican politician Gerry Adams), while the police have also sought to acquire copies of other interviews made by the project. Turned out that the guarantee given to participants that their recordings would remain secret wasn't actually legally enforceable, and the Northern Irish police managed to gain access to some of the interviews. I hope I'm not in breach of the 20 year rule by mentioning this - I'm doing so in the spirit of the historiographical exemption to the rule, as it's a high profile case in which the ethics and methods surrounding oral history were severely tested, and in my opinion found quite wanting.

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