Privacy is a lot like your health, you don’t think about it
until you lose it.
I was recently reminded of this when a family member decided
to send photos of me, inebriated and acting silly, out with the holiday
cards. Upon learning about this I was
angered, and felt my privacy had been compromised. A fun family intimate gathering, where I
could supposedly relax, was potentially being shared with the world. I trusted my family that these moments would
stay with those experiencing them, but with the aid of the camera, they were
not.
It was the use of the camera that led to Brandeis and Warren’s
seminal 1890 Harvard law review article that established the “Right
to privacy.” The authors wrote the
article in reaction to journalists publishing pictures of social events in the
paper. In their article they were trying
to draw the line between private and public life in the face of invasive technologies
when they stated, “Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have
invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous
mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered
in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops’."
In retrospect, what happen to me was quite minor. Other than suffering embarrassment, little
damage was done. Especially since the
pictures were hardcopies and not digital.
However, a similar holiday gathering did not work out so
well for Randi
Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
In this situation, Randi had taken pictures of her sisters
trying out a new Facebook app on their phones at a family gathering. She posted this on her Facebook (to her
supposed friends). One of these was a
mediaite, who subscribed to Zuckerman’s feed, and assuming the photo was
public, posted it on Twitter to her 40,000 followers. Well, Randi was angry.
Observers were quick to point out that the slip up was due
to Facebook’s confusing privacy settings.
However, the lessons learned from Randi’s privacy violation
and to a lesser extent mine, can be summed up by Randi Zuckerman’s tweet: "Digital
etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's
not about privacy settings, it's about human decency."
In the end, the
tweet with Zuckerberg’s photo was removed and the hard copies of my embarrassing
copies were returned to me.
In the future I
need to be more aware of cameras at social gatherings, and also mindful of the
pictures I take and post.
Have you
compromised another’s privacy or had your privacy compromised by photos posted
online?
