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Comment by taxidump | Hacker News Reader

This is perfectly legal in most of the US.

Famous people and their paparazzi followers probably know all too well that when you are anywhere an eye can see from a public location you can be recorded.

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As I understand it (and IANAL) there is a pretty well-established legal distinction between people whose job or avocation inevitably involves being famous and noticed, and just ordinary citizens. If you become a politician, singer, actor, etc. it is assumed that your expectation of privacy is different than for most people. Again IANAL, but my understanding is that just because photographers are allowed to hound famous actors, doesn't mean they can do it to someone who isn't newsworthy or otherwise in a public profession. IANAL.

Famous people have different expectations of privacy than ordinary people.

Citation?

Public Figure Doctrine in the US. According to it, if you are a public figure libel and defamation have much higher burden's of proof whereas if you aren't a public figure you don't. And there are concepts like "Limited Purpose Public Figure" (as distinct from 'all purpose public figures'). All purpose public figures- people who are in "positions of such persuasive power and influence that they are deemed public figure for all purposes"- like movie stars, sports stars, and politicians, have essentially an impossible time winning any court case bringing libel or defamation (they need to prove "actual malice" on the part of the person doing the defamation). LPPF's are people who make themselves public figures on a single controversy or issue, and have a hard time proving defamation on that topic, but are still private citizens for other purposes. Say, an otherwise unremarkable person who is the named defendant in a Supreme Court case- for the issue that went before the Supreme Court they will have a hard time proving defamation but in terms of the rest of their life they have the same protections that anyone else holds, and a lower burden of proof for damages.

All of this was worked out in the 1960's and 1970's, and I don't keep up on it so I'm not sure how courts have mapped Limited Purpose Public Figures onto modern social media: is an Instagram influencer a LPPF or a all-purpose public figure or a regular person?

I found this:

> My understanding of the rule that has emerged from prior decisions is that there is a twofold requirement, first that a person have exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy and, second, that the expectation be one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable."

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz_v._United_States

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