20 Mar 09 | Uncategorized
London’s office workers have been wasting employers’ time this week with Google’s Street View. Putting together millions of images of London (and other cities) Google has created a virtual metropolis to explore. Of course, most people haven’t really been exploring, just looking up their homes and offices (the Index on Censorship office was a little disappointing — I couldn’t see in the window).
It’s still quite fun, and presumably has a useful commercial application — with the possibility of adverts popping up as you ‘walk’ past certain shops, perhaps.
But now the Evening Standard reports that Google has been taking some images down, due to ‘privacy concerns’.
These seem to come from a range of people who have inadvertantly been caught in snapshots by Google’s cameras, including a man caught leaving a Soho sex shop and another vomiting in a Shoreditch street.
Quote of the day: ‘One image which has been removed is of a man vomiting outside a pub in Shoreditch. The screen now just says: “This image is no longer available.” However, by changing the position from which the scene can be viewed, the Evening Standard was easily able to view the man being sick from a different angle.‘
10 Nov 08 | Uncategorized
Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre is not happy. In his speech to the Society of Editors last night, he railed against the dangers of the creeping introduction of the notion of privacy in UK law. Specifically, he singled out Mr Justice Eady, whose judgments in privacy cases he described as ‘arrogant and amoral’.
Privacy is undoubtedly a problem for the UK media. As Dacre rightly points out, Eady’s decisions upholding the right to privacy tend to favour the wealthy and powerful, making it extremely difficult for journalists to expose hypocrisy and conflicts of interest.
The right to privacy is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. As Gavin Millar wrote on indexoncensorship.org last week, ‘The right to privacy… was initially designed to prevent state interference in our private lives.’
But British judges, and particularly Eady, seem to have decided that the positive obligation of courts to protect privacy extends to ‘protection against unjustifiable media intrusion into people’s lives’.
The argument, then, becomes about what is and what isn’t justifiable. Paul Dacre and other editors have one definition. Mr Justice Eady’s definition is quite different.
UPDATE: The Daily Telegraph‘s Joshua Rozenberg is hosting a debate on Dacre’s remarks on the Sky News website at 12.30 (BST). Watch it here
07 Nov 08 | Comment
Privacy cases in the UK continue to pose a significant challenge to press freedom, says Gavin Millar
(more…)
31 Oct 08 | News and features
Actor Sienna Miller has launched a law suit against the photographic agency Big Pictures (UK) Ltd and its founder, Darryn Lyons. Miller is seeking compensation for harassment and breaches of privacy.
Read more here
