The line between curiosity and invasion of privacy
Privacy is hard to come by these days. The world has become a place without filters, where the best and the worst in us have full range of expression, and where lives can be celebrated or tarnished in an instant.
This age of algorithms, data collection, account hacking and social media has created an information contradiction — we’ve become a society of gossips, at the same time becoming ever more protective of our own privacy.
We’ve even legislated it with seemingly incongruent regulations on access to information combined with restrictions against it. We struggle to sort out when the right to privacy ends and the right to know begins.
There’s nothing more private, or more public, than a death. At a time when news, lies and rumours speed around the world in milliseconds, families are increasingly reluctant to release even the name of a loved one who has died, let alone the cause, and police and coroner’s services are backing them up.