Emails, photos, and the public’s interests
Earlier this week, I appeared on the Todayfm radio programme The Last Word, with guest presenter Anton Savage and fellow contributor Patrick Kinsella of the School of Communications at DCU (you can listen back to the show here until next Thursday). Newspapers earlier in the week had reported that male employees at the Dublin office of an international accountancy firm had circulated an email rating newly arrived female trainees for a Top 10 list. The following day, several newspapers went further and published the photos and names of the women involved. On the radio programme, we discussed whether this later coverage crossed a line and invaded the women’s privacy.
Both Patrick and I argued that the later coverage did indeed cross that line. In my view, there was an invasion of the women’s privacy, and not once but twice. There was a wrongful intrusion into the women’s private activities, by the disclosure of information in which they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, first by other individuals within the company, and then by the media.
Within the company, the women had their photographs taken for human resources or personnel purposes, but these images were misused for prurience and titillation, first by people within the firm and then by the newspapers which published them.…
