The right to privacy is based explicitly on respecting cultural taboos of individuals. Ordinary identifiable people should not be shown in public doing things they reasonably would not like to be seen doing, except when the public need for information is great enough to overcome this. In WP terms, this is the BLP principle of "do no harm" and it applies as much to images as it does to articles.
There are people to whom this does not apply at all, such as public figures when the matter is relevant to their notability or otherwise the proper focus of responsible news coverage, and even private individuals when the matter is sufficiently important--and this is the same for images as articles, and for all WP content. As with BLP, it applies with special force to children and others incapable of giving consent or incapable of being aware that their conduct was being recorded. I am not a BLP-expansionist; I interpret the need for information fairly liberally, but when that does not apply I have always been on the strict side of enforcing this with such things as internet memes. In practice in almost all societies, sexual behavior is regarded as more private than other things, and it is related to the almost universal taboo about the display of nude genitals in public in ordinary situations. Therefore the right to privacy does apply with special force here. I think we have an obligation to remove or obscure the identities for nude or sexual images of living people who have not explicitly or implicitly given their consent, or who are unable to give it. I can imagine situations where the right to public information might over-ride this, but they would be exceptional. (The hypothetical case of a nude congressman in front of the Capitol was mentioned somewhere in these discussions.) This is to be judged in terms of their culture, not ours'; we should deal differently with a beach in Sweden or in Saudi Arabia. But all of this is irrelevant to the original censorship issue, because we are not protecting our audience, who can personally or by proxy protect themselves & have the responsibility for doing so; we are protecting our subjects, who cannot. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
