Privacy is a right regarded by most
citizens as one of the most important, right behind the rights
guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Although
levels vary depending on where someone is, a person always expects a
certain measure of privacy. Public bathrooms are the most obvious
example of one place outside the home where a person can reasonably
expect the same amount of privacy as he or she would receive at home.
This means that you can expect that nobody can legally charge into
your house without your permission, and nobody can legally take
pictures of you without your permission.
Everyone who pays any attention to the
news at all (which is a sadly small percentage of the American
population) has some idea that the United States government is spying
on its citizens and allies. It's a huge privacy rights issue
(although you would never know by the amount of citizen apathy). We
are in a state of constant surveillance that most of the time; the
idea that someone may be recording our internet traffic, phone
records, along with the fact that there are cameras on practically
every city corner that monitor everything within sight isn't such a
shocking idea to many people anymore. The young adults who are
growing up in this environment, we, in our environment, are used to
it.
In most places outside the home, a
person can be photographed without consent, as long as the
photographer is not a professional or representing any company or
business. However, examples of times when privacy is generally
regarded as having been violated, but not usually legally so, are in
cases of “downblousing” and “upskirting.” Upskirting is when
someone (of dubious morality) takes a picture, usually with a cell
phone camera, up a woman's skirt without her knowledge and, thus,
without consent. Downblousing is much the same thing, except the
photograph is taken of the woman's breasts from above her shirt. In
September 2014, a Washington DC judge ruled that upskirting is not a
violation of privacy; in the same month, the Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals ruled that the photographs are an expression of free speech
of the photographer, and therefore protected under the First
Amendment. The reasoning is that there is no harm done in taking a
picture. There are a few issues with privacy in these cases; namely,
that the women do not want what they consider their private areas to
be photographed and disseminated for everyone and their mother to
see.
This is just one example of how
technology has forced us to confront issues that we have never had to
confront before. As new technologies are developed, we have to
constantly adjust our standards and definitions of what constitutes
privacy and violations of privacy. In many cases, the legal
adjustments of these definitions are either slowly coming or
seemingly not coming at all.
Because I have grown up in a time when
technology is being created and produced as an exponential rate, most
developments are received with a smile and, “Hey, that's pretty
cool.” These technologies aren't something we really think about in
a critical way, mainly because they're being developed at such a fast
rate. I really don't like that my own government has the audacity to
constantly run surveillance on its own citizens and allies, but I
don't see much about this situation being changed until the majority
of the population begins to care about what the government wants with
that information.
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