Today@Dal

Posted on CBC.ca on September 19:

In the latest scandal to consume the House of Windsor, palace mandarins wasted no time pulling out some heavy legal ammunition.

On Tuesday, they got some satisfaction in France: an injunction was issued against the gossip magazine that put pictures of a topless Duchess of Cambridge on view for all to see.

While that means the publisher was supposed to hand over digital copies of photos snapped by a photographer with a very long lens in Provence, it hardly resolves the larger question of just how much privacy a royal — or anyone, for that matter — can expect in this era of instant internet communication.

...

So then ultimately, what right and expectation of privacy exists?

"Ultimately anybody can invade anybody's privacy," says Robert Currie, director of the law and technology institute at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University in Halifax

"You could be in a walled compound, but I could fly over with a helicopter and take pictures of you. Does that mean you weren't entitled to expect a bit of privacy in your walled compound? No. Most reasonable people would say you were and that it was unduly invasive for me to fly over with a helicopter just to take pictures of you."

For Currie, the question of whether privacy laws work is a good one, but one that's too big to answer.

"You'd have to try to measure it quantitatively."

As a society, he says, we have an interest in there being effective privacy laws.

Read the rest of the article at CBC.ca.