Privacy in the New Media Age.

• Author: Hearn, Anthony S.
• Position: Book review

Privacy in the New Media Age

By Jon L. Mills

In the 19th century, the news media was only beginning to embrace the technological advancement of film photography. Born of chemistry, "instantaneous photography" permitted a new paradigm of ever more invasive news reporting to supplant its print-only predecessor. The advent of photojournalism resulted in widespread privacy concerns, leading Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to declare:

Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone." (1)

The privacy rights of action utilized in the courts today were developed to meet the threat posed by film technology.

Today, individuals post digital images and video to social media in mere seconds. The soapbox of the 19th and 20th centuries has been replaced by the blogosphere where individuals, unlimited by editorial oversight, are able to publish their views--whether misrepresentation or otherwise--to a global audience in a constant stream. Twitter and Facebook have become leaders in breaking news stories. The market for fresh information demands greater speed and ever fresher content. The result is an erosion of accuracy in reporting in favor of speed and an increasing public appetite for exposure of private images and information. The gravity of inaccurate reporting and breaches of privacy are only compounded by the reality that once content is published to the Internet, it is published in perpetuity.

For those individuals who have their private photographs published, their secrets outed, or are otherwise mischaracterized on the Internet, the remedies available to them are equipped to redress harms presented by an earlier technological epoch. Others' privacy claims will wilt in light of the strong U.S. policy interests in protecting free speech and freedom of the press.

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