Seeing she was pursued by a leather-clad Swat team of paparazzi on her 25th birthday, who could dispute that Kate Middleton’s privacy was being invaded? The Press Complaints Commission code states that it is “unacceptable to photograph individuals in private places without their consent”, such places being defined as where a person has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” — which would seem to include strolling down your Chelsea street in a flippy Top Shop dress.
And yet here I am stalking about my own, less ritzy neighbourhood, returning a (late as usual) DVD to the video shop, paying cheques into my bank, buying bread in a supermarket, having coffee in the winter sunshine outside the park café. That’s four times I will be filmed by CCTV cameras — far more if, as is likely, my whole high street is monitored by police cameras — without my consent, when I have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I’m not using this comparison to make some alarmist Big Brother point or bracketing myself with a Royal girlfriend or suggesting that me wandering Somerfield in scruffy tracksuit bottoms will make Heat magazine. But the very concept of privacy in Britain, the laws and codes that guard it and our feelings towards our most private selves are entangled in paradox.
Take the photographing of children, for example, a matter taken so gravely that, if my sons are appearing in an activity that may end up in the South London Press or even on the school website, I must give written consent. Most swimming pools ban us from snapping our children splashing innocently about. Some schools even prohibit parents from videoing their kids in a nativity play. Images of identifiable minors in the public domain provoke horror that paedophiles could be aroused by them, although the odds of this are infinitesimal and, in any case, the children would never know, let alone be harmed.
And yet go to the website www.flickr.com and type in the words “naked baby” and up pop 2,652 photos of totally nude tots cavorting on the beach or in the bath. These images are put there, mostly, by their own parents. A photo album sits on a dusty shelf, a slideshow can only bore your clique of friends, but online your winsome cutey can be seen — and commented upon — by the entire world.
There are 70 million photos on flickr: wedding snaps, a thousand different tourists smiling before the Eiffel Tower. Some are strange and arresting, but many are banal, everyday moments in nameless but rarely faceless lives. What makes a man cooking a mushroom risotto one evening in his own kitchen put his dinner on a plate and then, before eating, photograph it and download the image on to the internet? Is it a desire to affirm his own existence, a phatic cry across the cyberworld: “I am here!”
Do we feel, increasingly, that our experiences have no validity unless we can see them through a secondary medium? I see teenagers at gigs so absorbed with videoing the performance on mobile phones, they give no attention to the live action right before their eyes.
The private and public domains have blurred as never before. If individuals get such pleasure from revealing so much of their lives, what right do they have to squeal when someone tugs off one extra veil? This week the page three stunna Keeley Hazel went legal after a video of her having sex with an ex-boyfriend turned up online. “It’s a disgraceful invasion of my privacy,” said the woman who poses topless for men’s magazines. “Now I feel I have no dignity left.”
Yet in the video, which I have watched (and how reassuring to learn that even celebrities can be hopeless in bed), she keeps her bra on during coitus. How odd. Was she really too drunk in Tenerife, too much in love, too swoony with sexual narcissism not to foresee this very private moment might be made public? Or was this a stunt? And in order not to jeopardise her lucrative photo shoots, did she purposefully conceal her biggest assets?
Celebrities have long colluded with the media’s intrusion, from D-list E-cuppers who stage snaps of themselves oiling up topless on a beach to Princess Diana who rang newspapers to warn them of a photo opportunity that, during her marriage break-up, would best serve her cause.
Does a star have a right to fess up to a substance addiction accompanied by Mario Testino portraits one moment, then shove the baseball cap down hard on his head and expect to be left alone until he has new wares to plug? It would seem so. In December, the appeal court decided that the Canadian folk singer Loreena McKennitt could stop her former friend Niema Ash from publishing a revealing memoir. Just because a star has spilt their secrets, the court ruled, doesn’t mean others are allowed to give their intimate version of events.
But we are all, famous or not, letting our privacy slip away. Without any public debate or consultation we have become the most watched society on earth. Britain has a fifth of all the CCTV cameras in existence: that’s one for every 12 people. When the director Andrea Arnold was promoting her movie Red Road, which concerns a CCTV operator employed to watch a Scottish housing estate, European interviewers assumed it was some fictional dystopian Britain. They were aghast to learn it was a gritty, realistic depiction of surveillance in contemporary Glasgow.
Cameras spring up without opposition: indeed we welcome them, they make us feel safer, we hand over responsiblity for intervening in our communities to unseen eyes. Indeed, the biggest boast of a headteacher at a secondary school I visited was that he’d just got spanking new CCTV network to spy on his pupils.
But then I doubt they mind. The young are growing up with a very different concept of privacy. With their home pages on MySpace, uploading fragments of their lives onto YouTube, they expect to be watched, they relish scrutiny. They would compare my unease at their voluntary exposure to a primitive tribesman who believes the camera steals his soul (although I believe that maybe it does, just a little).
Publicity is sunshine to be basked in. And you can see this in Kate Middleton’s eyes. Unlike her boyfriend, who has grown up mindful of his intimate life, she isn’t hating this media scrum. Not quite yet.
