Society

The face that launched a thousand lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy by Jessica Lake

Item: The face that launched a thousand lawsuits
Author: Marama Whyte

by Marama Whyte •

May 2018, no. 401

Yale University Press (Footprint), $150 hb, 320 pp, 9780300214222

Society

The face that launched a thousand lawsuits: The American women who forged a right to privacy by Jessica Lake

by Marama Whyte •

May 2018, no. 401

Privacy is having its moment. Google users have unknowingly permitted the corporation to track their every movement and record every web search, YouTube video watched, and more. Facebook allowed data to be collected from users and their friends via a third-party application, which were then used by data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to target Trump voters with ‘fake news’ in the 2016 US presidential election. And personal data is far from all that can be bought and sold online. In 2014, more than 250 celebrity- owned iCloud accounts were hacked, and their explicit personal photos disseminated online. The prevalence of sharing non-consensual pornography (‘revenge porn’) is not restricted to the rich and famous. In the United States, the Data and Society Research Institute reported in 2016 that one in twenty-five Americans had been a victim of ‘image-based abuse’, to use the terminology now preferred by researchers. In Australia, according to a 2017 RMIT University report, that number is around one in five.

Marama Whyte

Marama Whyte is a writer and historian based in Sydney. She is completing a PhD in U.S. women's history at the University of Sydney and was a 2018–2019 Endeavour Scholar at New York University. She has published in The Washington Post, The Conversation, and History Today.