A few unrelated incidents in the last month or so made me think about privacy, or rather, the lack of it. The first was news coverage on Bangalore Mirror where they skipped the standard blurring of the face of the accused/victim. I tweeted about it then.
Not a fan of Bangalore Mirror’s policy of not blurring faces of guilty/allegedly guilty. Second day in a row!
— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) August 26, 2016
A couple of weeks later, I read the agonising story of the woman whose picture was all over social media during the Brussels bombing. It wasn’t just her harrowing experience that bothered me, but the fact that this was an exposure she didn’t want. She had no say in the matter from the time the first photo was clicked.
It reminded of my culpability in something that happened a couple of years ago when I was reviewing a restaurant (I simply can’t remember which one!) for Mirror. The standard practice is for me to visit the place, review anonymously, and then call the management the next day for details. Though Bangalore Mirror sends the photographer later, I take photos as well, for the blog. In this case, when I spoke to the owner, he said he didn’t want the review published. I said that there were reviews on Zomato and I didn’t see the point in his resisting. The review did get published, and incidentally, the rating wasn’t bad. But now, it does make me think. While it might be open to the public, does the restaurant have a right to its privacy? Barring the corporation vs individual entity legal fine print, is the situation so different from using a person’s public photos on FB in mass/social media irrespective of the person’s wishes? And that also makes me think further, how much has our concept of privacy changed in the recent past?
From the time that Schmidt uttered these (in)famous words all those years ago, I have been conscious of the trade off. The ability to have a voice, connect and share with others against actions being monitored, stored, and perhaps manipulated and traded by known and unknown entities. As a society, (generalising) we are increasingly public by default – the selfies phenomenon is just another step in exhibitionism. We also appear to have an ever expanding appetite for voyeurism, with seemingly no idea of the potential implications. But more than that, what worries me is the related consequence – the callousness with which we treat others’ privacy irrespective of their wishes. Almost like driving these days – it’s not enough that you drive well, you also have to factor in the idiocy/ignorance of those who don’t, because you’ll be affected anyway! Increasingly reminding me of the plot progression in The Circle, a work of fiction, where transparency moves from a choice to a mandate and an ethos of “privacy is theft”. I now have to wonder if that’s dystopian fiction or an inevitable reality.
Slightly de-contextualizing the quote by Schmidt, could it be that we’re also conditioned by society to not share certain things vs. the deed itself being wrong
The same way we’re unconciously conditioned by society to publicly share certain types of events without a moral clause attached to it
Agree on the first. Still trying to find an example for the second. I think changing societal constructs in itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but is the change a conscious effort to better the way the things are, or is it a result of just doing things we can with no thought on the consequences? In this context, I think it’s the latter, and that’s the worry.
Yup, definitely makes sense.