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The Mythical Right To Obscurity, Heidi R. Anderson
The Mythical Right To Obscurity, Heidi R. Anderson
Heidi R Anderson
In several states, citizens who videotaped police misconduct and distributed the videos via the Internet recently were arrested for violating state wiretapping statutes. These arrests highlight a clash between two key interests—the public’s desire to hold the officers accountable via exposure and the officers’ desire to keep the information private. The arrests also raise an oft-debated privacy law question: When should something done or said in public nevertheless be legally protected as private?
For decades, the answer has been: “There can be no privacy in that which is already public.” However, given recent technological developments (e.g., cell phone cameras and …