More on the STC case, where girls were not allowed to march in graduation rites because of their alleged racy photos, and despite winning a court order that commanded the school to let them participate. Various suits have been filed, and the latest centers on why the school ended up possessing photos of the girls, when the girls had posted them in their Facebook accounts: and not delivered them to the school.
The focus of the defense is that these girls couldn’t have had legitimate expectations of privacy once they had uploaded their pictures in the web. That’s because, as some have theorized, the web is one wild, wild frontier where people share their most intimate stories to strangers and accounts get hacked. Internet users should therefore not expect to have privacy, and if you do, then those expectations belong in a fanciful realm called “wishful thinking.”
I disagree. I believe we still expect a modicum of privacy, some boundaries to be set and followed, whenever we go online. And to be told that this won’t be the case, and the general rule to be followed moving forward is everyone can grab and use and own what’s on the web, is alarming. And hardly a principle that can be supported.
Sure we can gab about our life stories and whine about pesky situations and gush over food. But not anyone can just follow a web citizen and then compile his life story and turn that into a book: that would be stealing his intellectual property.
When we open an account, (and I can only speak about Facebook because I am a Twitter virgin) we’re given choices as to who we want our account to be visible to. We go through the options provided in what they call “privacy settings”, and we pick whether we only want family to see some aspects of our lives, and friends to see the others. There are closed groups that are open only to those invited, and cannot be seen by anyone else.
If these boundaries were breached, say by Facebook itself, and everything in an account disgorged to Rupert Murdoch, wouldn’t that give the accountholder the right to sue Facebook for breach of the contract? And it would certainly be an invasion of privacy, for a news outfit to trawl through an account after suborning Facebook to allow access to the account.
We have email accounts in Yahoo and Gmail and AOL. Does signing up and opening an email account ever legitimize the email provider to suddenly open up correspondence to the world, on the ground we shouldn’t expect privacy? That’s the very reason companies have to tell their employees in carefully spelled out HR policies that the company owns their email account, so they better not write personal email there: because these employees do come in expecting that their email is their own private domain.
Artists post their creations on various sites, and every pretentious art critic can come and judge their works. But no one can claim authorship over those works and license the images away, other than the original artist.
Companies post their logos on their websites. Sure everyone can see these logos and print them out and paste them on any surface. But just because they’re on the web doesn’t allow the marketing of products using those misappropriated logos under intellectual property laws.
I may be confusing ownership and privacy, but that’s because they are linked. We own our lives, we own our stories. And we own the decision to keep them private.
There’s still an element of ownership over stuff we put on the web. For sure, some we willingly and voluntarily give away, depending on the site where we are. Some, we have no choice, because that’s the terms we accept by contract, forced upon us by the site itself. Some, we keep hidden. And want them to stay that way.
When I think about it, could those girls have expected their photos to have remained private? Even if they knew it was the internet they were uploading to? Sure, why not. Aren’t we talking about minors, whose incapacity for understanding the ramifications and consequences of their actions, the law has already presumed? Why then do we judge them by and expect them to live up to standards that are, in any case, still being debated by theorists and jurists? Now that’s wishful thinking.