…[T]hese are PHOTOGRAPHS. These are the objects police use to identify criminals. These are things that explicitly and routinely constitute evidence. They are precisely the opposite of anonymous—they are vehicles of anti-anonymity. And yet many people in this community bizarrely insist that they are somehow irrelevant, and that posting them is not a violation of a person’s privacy.
Whereas connecting a username to someone’s actual name—not to their body, just to another label, another way they exist in the world—is a MASSIVE PRIVACY VIOLATION.
The implication is that privacy resides in your name, not in your body. If you’re a man with the luxury to think this way, your body is understood as a sort of irrelevant accessory to your name, the thing that really matters. An invasion of privacy isn’t interpreted as a literal invasion. Although they plainly are, men’s bodies aren’t understood as being capable of being penetrated. People with this mentality don’t see a photograph as an invasion of privacy because they don’t experience the image of their bodies as being connected to the privacy that is capable of being violated….
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The whole thing is worth reading, but I clipped this part because it talks about how gender affects one’s notion of ‘privacy’. It’s ridiculous to assert that publishing someone’s name without their consent is a privacy violation while also asserting that publishing their photograph without consent isn’t.
Also, many times, women and girls have been named/identified just through their images. This is particularly true for those whose pictures are stolen from social media websites and online photo accounts. This can open them up to real life stalking, harassment, and even assault. So there’s the real risk of female internet users having their privacy violated in multiple ways.
(via downlo)
