Irish Examiner View: Honest was the best policy when naming coronavirus school

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg has amassed a fortune of around €75bn by making privacy redundant. He — and the 3bn people who use Facebook — has changed how data is managed or shared. Social media has thrashed the old comforts, the old shields of controlling information and how, or if, it reaches the public domain. The genie is out of the bottle.

This newspaper has been criticised for naming the Dublin school closed because of coronavirus, even though it had been identified on social media. Anyone with a smartphone — 97% of the population has access to one — could identify it. This criticism is at best bizarre and dangerously naive.

Much of official Ireland skirted around identifying the school, in a way that suggests a poor understanding of how the goalposts have moved. Secrecy is, for better or worse, no longer an option in circumstances like these. Indeed, it is dangerously counterproductive, as some of the wild rumours circulating confirm. Honesty and openness are, until a vaccine is available, the only sensible responses to the threat.

The mushroom days are gone.