Italian divorcee cannot post wedding pics

C-Net reports on Italian divorce law:

In Naples, Italy, one husband decided to take a stand against his wife posting their intimate marital photos on Facebook. Well, when I say "intimate," there were one or two hugging and kissing pictures.

These, you see, were their honeymoon photos from 10 years ago.

He was so miffed that she'd bared them to the public that he took her to court. This was clearly a happy marriage.

As The Local reports, relying on the extremely local Il Mattino, the husband objected that the photos had been displayed "without his permission."

I can feel the worldwide rolling of eyes and snorting through noses at the concept that a wife needs her husband's permission to do anything.

Some, though, might find the woman's argument a touch troubling. Her lawyer offered that "the use of social networks is now so advanced that we can consider a Facebook wall to be not unlike a private photo album."

We can debate the "advanced" nature of social networks until our third marriages have gone stale.

However, Mark Zuckerberg's constantly changing notions of privacy -- summarized as "whatever suits Facebook's business at the time" -- have meant that Facebook has often seemed far more like the town square than a private photo album.

The Naples court, indeed, sided with the husband. It decided that his privacy had been violated and his delicate self-worth had been immolated.

In the USA, you don't need someone's consent to take a picture. It is the photographer who pushes the button who has all the rights, not the subject. If the picture is used to endorse a commercial product, then the subject's permission is needed.

Dilbert argues:

There are only two reasons to have privacy and both of them involve dysfunction. You might want privacy because...

1. you plan to do something illegal or unethical.
or
2. to protect you from a dysfunctional world.

I think we can agree that if the ONLY reason for privacy were to make it easier to get away with crimes and unethical behavior, society would be better off without privacy. So let's ignore the first category because it is only useful to criminals and scumbags.

The second category is more fun. My hypothesis is that in every situation in which you can think of a legitimate use for privacy you will find that the root problem is a lack of information about something else. My hypothesis is that if you fix the root problem, society no longer needs nor cares about privacy, and that is the best situation of all.

I don't really agree with him, but I do think that is where we are headed, whether we like it or not.