citizens deserve equal protection under the law. there's nothing special about his kid (or him). if anything, information about public figures, when in public, deserves less shielding.
As a public figure you cannot have any reasonable expectation of privacy. That’s different from saying what should be done with his private medical records.
I'm happy that we don't use your personal desire for ignorance as a guide when forming public policy.
The point of these sorts of laws "public persona" laws is not that we all desperately need to know trivia like George Clooney's natural hair color or what year Evelyn Schels was born, but rather that when you insert yourself into the public sphere you're free game for the public press because it's in the public's interest do know who you are and what you represent.
The press is one of the fundamental pillars of any functioning democracy, and if you can't write a basic article about some public personality without mentioning how old they are or other pertinent personal attributes without fear of legal retribution you've enacted a major barrier to public discourse.
This is absurd. Society can't function if knowing things about suspects is off limits. What are we children?
There's laws against crime of the sort you imply. We know the guy did something and that he exists. If people can't handle learning details about someone's background without doing something illegal, those people deserve to be behind bars too...not dictating information censorship for the rest of us.
If you'd like to make an argument that my work led to the publication of personal records, please make it more explicitly. I'd love to hear it fully articulated. Otherwise it's hard for me to read it as anything beyond a swipe.
We are assuming James posted such details to a public twitter feed. That does not account for the others who did not. The issue in Meryem's case is that obtaining birth records is not guaranteed (especially from a foreign country), and that birth location isn't the same as genetic ancestry. Regarding Alex:
> except for all the illegitimate children
That is part of my point. If my absent parent were actually some famous politician, I would personally not want to have that information leaked. Some might not care - that's great. My point is a simple one - just because having private medical info exfiltrated is not really a big deal for many people, doesn't mean that it's ok to give a pass to the parties responsible for the exfiltration.
There's a long and healthy discussion about this question in many legal systems. The topic of discussion is the definition of 'public figure'[0] and what that entails. Public figures usually don't enjoy the same right to privacy as other persons.
I can’t accidentally read top secret because it is secured much better than public places. I can’t disclose it by mistake. Its guards don’t expose it when they want to protest.
People privacy can’t be more important than government documents, because protecting each citizen is much more complex/pricy task than protecting those documents. Disclosing those documents is a problem for all citizens. Disclosing citizen privacy is a problem for him.
You can’t restrict good willing citizen rights because of bad guys.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm glad he's being charged. I wouldn't like it if some activist stole my data and made it public. If you believe that it's in the public interest for this information to be released, you should advocate for disclosure laws. For example, one possible law might require presidential candidates to release their tax returns. I support disclosure through legal means, not through vigilante behavior.
But it is still his finances as a private citizen, and not - for example - the details of some government agency. A matter being of interest to a subset of all citizens doesn’t justify its disclosure. We should either require disclosure by law (perhaps to an auditing firm instead of the public) or treat this as a purposeful and malicious leak of private, confidential information. I don’t think news media should get a pass on this.
There's the general rule of thumb that one's right to privacy is inversely proportional to one's power over others. Be it political, economic, or whatever. So a Presidential candidate deserves less privacy, because they pose more of a public risk. That distinction is clear in US libel law.
There are other interests that get balanced against the individual's right to privacy, including public interests like newsworthiness.
But indeed that can go both ways - the website of a newspaper might be required upon request to remove a 20-year-old crime blotter item reporting a single petty theft conviction for an otherwise law-abiding non-celebrity; they wouldn't be required to do that for a 2-year-old murder conviction.
I'm not agreeing with the assertion in this case, but there are very different standards for people "of public interest" and ordinary common folk. This distinction is made in a lot of places, including European privacy laws e.g. in Germany.
That's a terrible clause. Half the point of free exchange of information is so we can find which deeply-held beliefs (which are maleable, unlike color) are incorrect, detrimental, or even dangerous when acted on.
Black people and pedophiles don't deserve the same legal protections to have access to a playground or a private school.
I don't think he surrendered his privacy voluntarily. exposing his picture and info has nothing to do with law enforcement - that's just self-administered justice. a well functioning state of law / rule of law (I dunno how you call it in english) works by sentencing criminals to prison according to the scale of their crime. not by punishing them overtly and excessively as a warning to other criminals (that's just barbaric).
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