On Privacy

I recently read the fascinating new book, Conspiracy, by Ryan Holiday. The book tells the behind the scenes story of the case of Terry Bollea (a/k/a Hulk Hogan) v. Gawker Media. For those not familiar, a few years back one of the websites owned by Gawker published a sex tape featuring Hogan (a former professional wrestler) in an intimate setting with his best friend’s wife. Hogan had been unaware that the tape was being made, and did not consent to its publication.

After the tape was released, Hogan sued Gawker for, among other things, invasion of privacy. The case went to trial and Hogan won. Gawker was hit with a $100+ million jury verdict, subsequently filed for bankruptcy, and was ultimately shut down. The case (and others around the same time) shined a spotlight on a dark side of online media and, in some sense, the jury verdict could be seen as having conveyed a message that society values its privacy.

The most interesting part of the story is that Hogan’s entire case was secretly funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of Paypal and, somewhat ironically given recent events, the first private investor in Facebook. Gawker had revealed that Thiel was gay several years prior to its publication of the Hogan sex tape. While Thiel’s sexuality was apparently an open secret amongst his friends, he was not happy with the public story, and plotted for several years to take the company down. He ultimately found his avenue to do so in the Hogan lawsuit, and succeeded.

As I sat down to write this, I received yet another email that my “data” had been hacked, this time from a fitness app that I use to track my workouts. Now, I’m not sure why anyone would want to read about my recent deadlift numbers, or how fast I can run two miles (hint: not very), but the timing couldn’t have been better (or worse, for my privacy).

Unfortunately, I’m no longer surprised when I hear of data breaches, and wasn’t really surprised by the recent news about the Facebook data situation. A company used my “likes” and “dislikes” to target me? I guess that was not entirely unforeseeable.

We’re living in a time when privacy is a fluid concept. Online data gets tracked, shared and used to target you with ads for products you might want. Commenters and internet trolls can hurl ill founded accusations about the private lives of public figures with impunity, and then quietly back off of them when the next story comes along or it turns out that they were just wrong. Or, in some cases, like that of Thiel and Hogan, stories get published that happen to be true, but that are really no one else’s business. Maybe the law is the solution, maybe not…