the right to be forgotten<\/a>\u201d allowed people to ask search engines (mostly Google) to stop unflattering news stories from appearing after certain search terms if the information was \u201cinadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant\u201d \u2013 all contestable terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt is easy to see why celebrities might want to prevent similarly unflattering or personal stories appearing in public. One fact confirmed during the New International phone hacking trial was that celebrities want press access on their own terms. This hardly surprising, but hardly reasonable either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The traditional retreat for proponents of these kind of privacy rights is that such information is not in the \u201cpublic interest\u201d, by which is meant an enlightened, civic interest rather than stories that titillate without wider social purpose. Whether this can be sensibly defined is practically the entire argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Given the success of the Mail Online\u2019s infamous sidebar of shame, the public remains interested in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and this is unlikely to change. And it\u2019s worth pointing out many celebrities are quite happy to play to the paps to keep their name in the public eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alongside this ambiguity, there is the fact that any privacy law risks protecting public figures from the journalistic scrutiny favoured by the high minds. It may be that public exposure of the likes of Stokes and Thomas is the price that must be paid for a useful press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two stories emerged this week regarding the private lives of elite sportsmen: rugby player Gareth Thomas and cricketer Ben Stokes. Thomas felt obliged to reveal his HIV status after a journalist from an unnamed tabloid threatened to out him. Worse, that reporter approached his parents for comment on the matter before they were aware of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[197,768,90,925,890],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4223"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4224,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4223\/revisions\/4224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rightdishonourable.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}