How much do you value your privacy?
Probably a great deal. Consider all the things that you would not want to happen to yourself.
You would not want anyone to read your letters.
You would not want anyone looking through the windows of your house while you were at home.
You would not, in this digital age, want anyone looking at your browsing history, your text messages, your emails, or indeed the photos that you may have chosen not to share.
That is why most people, though not all, are firmly on the side of the Hollywood actresses whose private photographs have been hacked and published.
As one of the victims of this latest hacking scandal so tartly and correctly observed via Twitter: “To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.”
And here we have the point: most of us are horrified by breaches of privacy.
But some of us are voyeurs.
Respect for the right to privacy is essential in a civilised society.
The right to privacy stems from the rights of conscience, that inner sanctuary which no human authority has the right to violate.
Regimes that do not respect privacy, such as that described in George Orwell’s 1984, rightly fill us with horror.
For if the right to privacy is not respected, what right will be?
Soviet Russia was adept at using naked photographs of people as weapons; most who worked for the KGB did so because the KGB blackmailed them. (The successors to the KGB are probably no different.)
It is commonly supposed that persons who ascended to power in Russia in the old days and who gained access to their files were horrified to find what was in them.
All of us can understand why, without too much of effort of the imagination. Continue reading
Source
- Fr. Alexander Lucie-Smith in The Catholic Herald
- See also John Birmingham, in The Age: Sharing not a scandal, it’s a crime
Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest, doctor of moral theology and consulting editor of The Catholic Herald.
Additional readingNews category: Analysis and Comment.
