By Quentin Langley
If you participate in a controversial political demonstration that is beset by violence - even if you didn't personally carry out any violence - you can reasonably expect that this will have an impact on your reputation. People may choose not to be your friend or your customer. Your employer might fire you. This is not, generally, an infringement of your right to freedom of speech. You have a right to hold any view you like, but you don't have a right to friends or a job.
There are exceptions. A government organization cannot usually, in a liberal democracy, have a categorical ban on employing people based on their political views. In the US that would fall foul of the First Amendment. But a private actor can associate with anyone it chooses.
None of this is new to the digital age. What is new is the speed and ease with which your image can be circulated and identified. Photographs of people at the so-called "alt-right" demonstration in Virginia are being circulated online with messages calling on people to "out" them to their employers. More than one person has been fired already. There's at least one allegation of a false positive - someone being mistakenly identified as having participated in the rally. Whether or not that proves to be the case in this instance, there's certainly a risk of that. There's also, presumably, a risk of people being maliciously brandjacked by someone falsely claiming they were at the rally.
Obviously, employers should proceed with caution and check the facts.
This is really at the soft end of the privacy issue. People have no reasonable expectation of privacy while participating in a public demonstration. That's just basic common sense.
But modern technology is blurring the distinction between the public and the private space. Partly this is just because people choose to share information about themselves in public and are sometimes surprised by the consequences. But there are other issues too. Information about you can be hacked from private sources and released. We are accustomed to the idea that a modest fence shields us from public view, but that's only true in two dimensions. If you are sunbathing naked behind a fence you were always at risk of being seen from a hot air balloon. That's a pretty small risk. But if digitally controlled drones become common place the risk begins to rise.
We are going to have to have a major public debate about this subject. The parameters of that debate are shifting very rapidly.
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