Privacy in a Globally Linked World
January 23rd, 2008 by Simon Heseltine
I just finished reading a great book by Daniel J. Solove titled: “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet”. In the book he talks about Reputation, Privacy and the legal issues surrounding both. In there he has examples of real life law suits, where people have been photographed or videotaped doing something in public, and it’s been posted on the web and gone viral, in many cases causing problems for the people involved.I started thinking about this again today when I read the story about a Chinese couple that kissed on a train platform last September, only to find out that last week someone had taken the CCTV footage from the platform and uploaded it to YouTube and other video sharing sites. Should that couple have the expectation of privacy? Sure, they were kissing in public, but at the most they only intended anyone else waiting for a train to notice (should there have been anyone else there). What they didn’t intend was for a global audience of thousands to see it, so they’ve sued the train operator for the fact that the footage was released.
Reputation Management wise, was this the best thing that they could have done? Now that they’ve sued, the press all over the world has picked up the story, however the press that I’ve seen has actually been fairly responsible and not posted either details on the couple, nor links to the video, which means that they’re not either pushing people to the video, or helping it to rank higher. This is good news for the couple, as it limits their further embarrassment. With this lawsuit they can maybe get a change made to the laws of their country to prevent this from happening in the future.
But what happens if the law goes too far? Where’s the line between privacy and the public good? Should a flasher have their picture posted on the web? Photos of license plates of cars cruising the wrong area of town? Video of an traffic law violators being pulled over? Something to think about in this CCTV globally linked world…
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