{"id":649145,"date":"2013-03-27T13:55:59","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T17:55:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=624815"},"modified":"2013-03-27T13:55:59","modified_gmt":"2013-03-27T17:55:59","slug":"instagram-makes-us-all-paparazzi-but-were-not-all-celebrities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/649145","title":{"rendered":"Instagram makes us all paparazzi, but we\u2019re not all celebrities"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Instagram is helping birth a new breed of paparazzi<\/a>, we might need a new breed of privacy law to counteract it.<\/p>\n

As an examination of the evolving economics of snapping celebrity photos, Jenna Wortham’s Tuesday New York Times blog post about how a recent candid pic of Beyonce spread across the internet is pretty revelatory. Lurking below the surface, though, I think there’s an even bigger story about how easy it is to snap and publish photos of everyone — not just celebrities — and for those photos to spread further and faster than ever before possible.<\/p>\n

Just recently, for example, some relatively harmless (albeit juvenile) “big dongle” jokes put two unwitting conference attendees in the public eye<\/a> and cost one of them his job. He wasn’t on stage; he was sitting in the 10th row during a talk. The woman who tweeted their images and her complaint ultimately lost her job, too, but her misfortune doesn’t cover his rent.<\/p>\n

Even ten years ago, that woman wouldn’t have had a cellphone with a camera and an internet connection and a platform to spread the pic to thousands of Twitter followers — and their followers — in seconds.<\/p>\n

I’m not certain privacy laws created at the dawn of the photography era and advanced during the print-media era are well suited to protect our solitude and anonymity in the Instragram era. I actually wrote about this in September 2011<\/a>, but now seems like a good time to re-raise some of the tough legal questions that phenomena such as self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. Here are some situations where the social web confuses traditional definitions of public and private, and publication versus publicity:<\/p>\n

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If a celebrity\u2019s friend tweets a photo of that celebrity smoking pot in his own house, is that information protected because it\u2019s newsworthy?<\/span><\/p>\n

If I\u2019m an individual who simply wants to keep to myself \u2014 no Facebook, no Twitter, not even an email address \u2014 is writing about me on a personal blog or Facebook page, or uploading (and\/or tagging) photos of me, \u201chighly offensive to a reasonable person?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even if a disclosure is highly offensive, does publication via social media constitute\u00a0<\/span>publicity<\/em>? What if the publisher only has 3 friends? Or 100? Or 2,000?<\/span><\/p>\n

Does something going viral change a publication among friends into publicity?<\/span><\/p>\n

What if a Flickr photo from an intimate dinner with friends, not highly offensive, but potentially embarrassing just because someone is ugly, goes viral and the subject becomes a laughing-stock? What\u2019s the recourse?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You can insert Instagram, Tumblr or Pinterest into those example and the questions remain essentially the same.<\/p>\n

And with photos, especially, there’s a lot to consider:<\/p>\n

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[T]he confluence of facial-recognition technology, cloud computing and big-data processing could soon make it possible to determine a person\u2019s name and any publicly accessible information about them via a mobile app. Nefarious types with some data-science skills could predict your Social Security number knowing just your name, age and hometown. And it\u00a0all starts with a single photo<\/a>\u00a0on Facebook.<\/p>\n

For someone who has intentionally kept a low profile online to avoid sharing personal information, the advent of such technologies completely undermines that personal decision. Far from being just a face in the crowd or a guy at the end of the bar, anyone with a mobile phone and $4.99 app could know more personal information than that person would ever share willingly. All because his friends are sharing the details of\u00a0their own<\/em>\u00a0lives online.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

A Google Image search for “fat guy speedo.” Public? Yes. Fair to be presented to the entire world with one click? I don’t know.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

For us everyday, non-celebrity types, going out in public used to provide anonymity because we were just another face in the crowd. A dinner or party with some friends, even a family reunion, used to be a relatively private affair. Now, we’re just an Instragram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule.<\/p>\n

It used to be there was public and then there was\u00a0public.\u00a0<\/em>There was private and there was private<\/i>. For better or for worse, social media and smartphones are blurring those lines. Maybe we need some boundaries.<\/p>\n

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Zurijeta<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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