a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3728 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Great Naked Celebrity Photo Leak of 2014 is Just the Beginning

    Privacy is a privilege. It is rarely enjoyed by women or transgender men and women, queer people or people of color. When you are an Other, you are always in danger of having your body or some other intimate part of yourself exposed in one way or another.

No no no no no. Privacy is a goal. It is a Platonic ideal that we approach asymptotically only through great struggle. It is a desirable thing that does not come without a fight. It is not a privilege, not by a longshot - and implying that those with the most social privilege enjoy the least "privacy" privilege is demonstrably wrong. There are entire websites dedicated to "revenge porn" and "ex-wife pics" and the like and complaints against them are generally limited to the feminist fringe... but one famous person's inadvertent boob and suddenly it's a constitutional crisis.

If you're nobody and an ex-boyfriend posts your pics on Reddit, it's "sucks to be you." If you're somebody and a hacker posts your pics on Reddit, it's an internet full of cease and desist orders. That's the very definition of privilege, and it's not an aspect of the discussion that gets to the heart of the matter, which is power.

The anonymous internet likes to strike out against the named internet by destroying its privacy. This is why we dox; shabnameh have been keeping the Islamic world in line for over a hundred years. Sniping from the shadows is a method to power for the powerless but it doesn't make it any less of an attack.

The nonconsensual release of anything should be a big deal, and should be talked about in terms of abuse, not in terms of "privilege."