The Right to Privacy (1890)
groups.csail.mit.edu
groups.csail.mit.edu
This is not only nearly impossible to define in the general case more importantly what is of legitimate interest to me is potentially different from what is of legitimate interest to you and only by allowing the general publication of facts is it possible for the information relevant to you and i to each flow freely.
" The design of the law must be to protect those persons with whose affairs the community has no legitimate concern, from being dragged into an undesirable and undesired publicity and to protect all persons, whatsoever; their position or station, from having matters which they may properly prefer to keep private, made public against their will."
If I intend to hire you to watch my kids, work in my store, allow you to hang out with my daughter etc etc I have an interest in information about you being available.
" The right of one who has remained a private individual, to prevent his public portraiture, presents the simplest case for such extension; the right to protect one's self from pen portraiture, from a discussion by the press of one's private affairs"
This is great if the press is a handful of newspapers instead of the reality in which it is all of us communicating to each other.
I could go on and on and on but the problem remains that the "right to privacy" so defined is fundamentally impossible to distinguish from a club to stop people spreading the truth.
It would be more useful to continue punishing liars and try to better protect people from being fired/discriminated against for their private lives and speech rather than providing the rich a better way to silence inconvenient truths.
And this is why there are courts who decide how law applies in particular cases. This is how case law works. What the law means gets more meaning as precedents accumulate over time.
Related: "Trial by Machine" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2743800
As some judge said once, just because the public are interested in a thing, doesn't mean that the thing is in the public interest.
So no, I am absolutely not OK with allowing the sharing of my private life. I'm not OK with people knowing what dark jokes I've said about Nazis, I'm not OK with people knowing how I've cursed a minority in a moment of anger, I'm not OK with anyone knowing what I wrote in my diary.
I know that you can't stop the flow of information and that you're responsible for protecting yourself, but we should have some law to offer recompense to the party whose private life was exposed.
I guess this post was provoked by the recent Hogan vs Gawker case. I'm a bit divided on that - on the one hand it obviously damaged his reputation and career, and Gawker are responsible for that. You could argue that that is accidental damages, i.e. they didn't know the extent of the effect their actions would have. I guess it might make sense to offer insurance against that for the press - to cover court fees and damages arising from damaging a public figure during reporting. On the other hand, this is now posted, public, known and there is no silencing it. I would never ask Gawker to take down the sex tape, as that would both interfere with the freedom of the press and be absolutely ineffective in stopping the spreading of information. So my compromise is to both have Gawker pay, but not take down the video. I think this should make both equally unsatisfied, so it's the best compromise.
Could this then be a general compromise? If you share private details of someone doing something lawful, which damages his/her life, you are responsible and have to recompense him/her in some way (i.e. the court decides on how much you owe), but given the reality of the internet, the information can't be taken down.