Invasion of privacy = death?

It's a pretty tragic story here but one that perhaps leaves some room to ponder one of the central challenges of social media: privacy.

You can read about the basic chain of events here or for a more dramatic retelling, head to NYT.

This is being classified, in my opinion rightfully, as a case of criminal invasion of privacy. Students have also gone out to protest what they perceive is a lack of security measures in the use of technology in campuses. But then again, surely it would have been dismissed as a typical undergraduate prank had

a) it only been shared privately between the perpetrators and the victim
or
b) the encounter been a heterosexual one.

For this to really be an issue of privacy, then the question has to be asked as of various surveillance activities conducted by both government and private entities in many parts of the developed world. In other words, this is a special case due to the advances of consumer technology, allowing private individuals (and perhaps organisations as well) to destroy reputations or ruin lives.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.

As far as the hate crime aspect is concerned, it is hard to establish that this was genuinely the motivation, let alone that it was a hate crime. Do you really need to hate someone/something to have a laugh at them/it?

Goldstein's better point is the use of the term 'sport' in that it has become all too easy now to find out about things that may cause embarrassment to the subject of invasive technology. This is further coupled by the ease of publishing material to a mass audience.

There are several points of debate here but I am personally most interested in a kind of big picture, "what can society do about this" angle. On the one hand, there is the legalistic solution. We can limit, prohibit or ban such abuses in whatever creative ways but somehow this seems to be something of a game of evolution.

Laws are fated to become obsolete and so are security measures. New workarounds counter them, and then new measures mushroom up in a neverending battle.

The other possibility, and one that is far more of a sea change, is complete social change. It will require the acceptance of many taboo or contentious areas by the mainstream. It may seem a pipe dream to think that topics such as homosexuality (or religion or pornography to name a few other examples) will ever be met with nothing more than a shrug of the shoulder. Yet such things have happened before. Heretics used to be executed by the church since 380 AD but by the 20th century, the church could only expel such individuals.

Of course, this has come hand in hand with the separation of church and state. Whether or not a similar separation of the private and public (which for a while seemed to be the direction of post-Enlightenment Europe) is required is beyond my guesstimation. My point is rather, that faced with a clear problem, society tends to evolve organically around it.

It could very well be that in time, the sheer volume of such 'exposes' numbs us. In essence, a mediated synecdoche occurs where having seen examples of homosexuality played out in the public so often, the general public comes to believe - rightly or wrongly - that society is just that gay and there is nothing you can do about it.

Just like how Chinese Malaysians learn that in spite of it all, in KL/PJ, when you go to a hawker stall, you'll likely have to order in Cantonese but at a mamak stall, you speak in Malay. Perhaps there are better examples but you get what I mean.

In short, should the future be a private or public one? Privatising anything requires an element of alienation, be it land or personal lives. Already many people are closing Facebook accounts and trying to un-Google their lives. But technology will surely find other cracks in the wall. Is all this worth protecting or is a culture of 'openness' more suited to the hyperreality of the new millennium?

Personally? I'm not quite ashamed to admit that I've not had the chance to share the bed in my room with anyone, male or female.