Privacy is a strange thing in that we all want to have our private lives kept private yet want to know everything about other people. Sounds hypocritical, yet it’s just human nature to be interested in other people’s lives, and this is something the media is keen to often exploit to increase sales or views of its newspapers, gossip magazines or news programmes.
The law as it stands in Britain is that of if it’s in the public’s interest to know, then journalists are justified in reporting on the stories. These tend to often feature celebrities caught having affairs or other more lewd sexual fetishes, such as the likes of F1 boss Max Mosley who was reported to have had a Nazi gangbang in 2008. Now some would argue that it isn’t in the public’s interest to know these things, and that what people do behind closed doors is their private right to do whatever they please. Some yet would argue that if you don’t want bad press of having an affair then you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
However as of the year 2000 Britain brought in the Human Rights Act that said everyone has the right to privacy. It was no surprise then that soon celebrities were going to court to fight for their right to privacy, this was a prominent news story in early 2011 when it became known that a famous footballer had slept with former Ms Wales Imogen Thomas, despite being married, and had taken out a super injunction to prevent anyone, neither the press, or even Ms Thomas herself from speaking about it. This makes for some interesting debate as to whether someone’s right to privacy is more important than everyone’s right to free speech. Personally I believe that someone’s rights stop when they infringe on someone else’s rights, so in this case the footballers right to privacy would have been second to Imogen Thomas’s right to free speech and as such she would have been allowed to tell people of her affair.
Of course as of writing this it seems we all know the footballer in question (Ryan Giggs) and it’s interesting to see how we found out this information. It all started on twitter, ending with over 70,000 members re-tweeting the fact that Ryan Giggs was the anonymous football who had had an affair. In the end a member of parliament used his parliamentary privilege to say his name in the House of Commons and so it was confirmed. It was deemed impossible to round up all the thousands of people that had ousted Giggs on twitter and so they were left off the hook as it were. However soon after Giggs went to court in order to sue the anonymous figures who first spread the information onto the internet, twitter was forced to hand over private information it had on these people, and legal proceedings began. This raised the question, had internet anonymity been quashed and now could anyone who spreads false rumours, or breaks an injunction be brought to justice?
This isn’t the first time someone online has gotten in trouble for leaking information; there was huge uproar, especially in the USA after Wikileaks published cables of US embassies including thousands of pages that were classified secret. Julian Asange, the founder of Wikileaks was arrested after spending months on the run in Europe, the USA wanted him extradited and wanted to persecute him for treason, stating that he has endangered US military operations and diplomatic ties with nations. Others deem him a hero, some of the articles he has released raise important issues that need to be debated upon such as the American soldiers who killed Afghan civilians in a helicopter, Asange managed to leak the video of them speaking and shooting them proving they were deliberately out to kill them. If it wasn’t for Asange’s “act of treason” we may never have known about this.
In an age of connectivity, Twitter and Facebook, it is hard to have anything that is truly private anymore. People who believe the information they post onto Facebook is only accessible by themselves and friends are naive, Facebook stores this information, selling it to third parties as well as constantly tailoring adverts you get on Facebook based on what you talk about with friends, it’s as if you are constantly under surveillance, not a nice thought. Strangely enough people seem complacent with this idea, despite being completely against this sort of thing happening in real life.
It’s hard to draw a line on where liberties stop and privacy begins, what is deemed as so sensitive that it should not be published on the internet or in traditional media as to what is allowed?
Most people would agree that someone’s medical records are confidential and should not be published, and to their credit most newspapers respect these wishes, but in a society where everyone is a publisher through the power of the internet, how could you stop them from posting this online, and within hours having it heard and reposted thousands of times. Someone has to be accountable.
It’s not black and white as to when someone deserves privacy and when someone does not, we’ve touched on medical records and that is one that most people would agree is private, after this it becomes more clouded. Is it ok to release the identity of a reformed criminal? Some would say it is in the public’s interest to know if there’s a criminal living near them or their children and I can appreciate this point, however there’s also the chance that once their identity is known there will be reprisals and vigilante attacks made against them, now it might sound weird but I do not believe we release criminals simply to walk into the maws of the lions, we let them giving them the benefit of the doubt that they have reformed, and as such we should treat them like anyone other member of the public.
If we look back to Ryan Giggs, I believe it was wholly appropriate that it was revealed that he was having an affair, looking at his career he has built up an image of being a respected family man as well as a footballer. He gave up his freedom to privacy when he began indulging in having affairs while still acting as if he was this role model to young children. It’s completely hypocritical to say with one hand that you are a good man who sticks by his wife and pretends to have done nothing wrong while using the other to go behind her back and tarnish this holier than thou image.
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