A stranger could park a drone with a webcam outside your window and live-stream video footage from inside your house to the world, complete with sound. In fact, it’s probably not illegal. The view from the street is public. (...) You can talk to your friends about an issue in your life, even exposing information about how you’re vulnerable or affected by a circumstance. And if that conversation with friends happens to occur online, various publishers might capture it, remove it from its context, attach it to your real name, mention your employer or other affiliations, and then build their own narrative around it without your consent. Because social media is public. Public is not simply defined. Public is not just what can be viewed by others, but a fragile set of social conventions about what behaviors are acceptable and appropriate. (...) Policy makers and regulators are the only remaining group that could significantly affect the definition of what’s “public”. Thus far they, like all of society, have chosen to ignore the fact that our laws are wildly out of date in this regard. Everything from harassment laws to copyright battles to judicial decisions around privacy are all grounded in pre-Internet criteria of what constitutes public behavior or a public person.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 10:01:38 +0000
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