Have we lost the right to anonymity?
The chief executive of a US tech company has resigned after being caught on a big screen at a Coldplay concert embracing a woman, who was not his wife.
An offhand comment by frontman Chris Martin and a whole lot of internet sleuthing later and it turns out they were colleagues having an affair.
Details of their personal and professional lives have spread across social media like wildfire after footage of the two ducking for cover went viral.
Privacy lawyer Kathryn Dalziel told The Front Page that society has changed, we’re all carrying recording devices and there are CCTV cameras everywhere.
“So, the question is whether they have a reasonable expectation of privacy and whether the publication of facts about them would be offensive to a reasonable person.
“Quite frankly, standing at a concert swaying along to Coldplay probably doesn’t meet the legal tests of a privacy interest in this and what’s happened.
“Even though they might have made a bad moral judgment, they weren’t breaking the law; they weren’t doing anything that our Government says is wrong. They were just being people and they’re being judged by people. What do we do about that? I’m not 100% sure the law is the best place to do that,” she said.
Legally, there isn’t too much that can be done, Dalziel said, but morally as a society, we can do better.
“If that couple had been involved in an accident or something really bad happened to them that had nothing to do with their relationship, then there may have been some privacy interests. If they hadn’t been having an affair, they had the right of defamation. Arguably, some of the doxxing they’re receiving could amount to harassment, particularly if the media is camped outside their house,” she said.
It’s not the first time people have gone from complete unknowns to internet sensations.
One of the early examples of this type of public internet shaming was the 2013 story of Justine Sacco. She boarded a flight from New York to South Africa. Beforehand, she posted to her 170 followers a tweet that read: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!”
She turned off her phone and when she landed 11 hours later, her life had been destroyed. Her name was trending worldwide, she’d lost her job, she was being spoken about on the news and people were tracking her flight online.
Dalziel referenced Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813.
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?
“In the case of Pride and Prejudice, they dined with four and 20 families. It was a village. Now, we are a global village where millions, billions of people are doing, behaving in exactly the same way as in Jane Austen’s village.
“We are human animals. We want to belong to a club. The club’s weighing in. And so we join the club because we want to be seen as part of it. People get senses of belonging, participating, and commenting regardless of the outcome on the other person,” she said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about the legalities of leaving your house and being captured on candid camera.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.