Celebrities' Privacy vs. Freedom of Expression

Introduction

Celebrities as public figures publish more information than ordinary people, and at the same time, the public is eager to pry into their private life through the media, but it is easy to clash with each other. Therefore, it is worth discussing whether the law should take celebrities’ privacy as priority or the right to freedom of expression when conflicts happen. This essay illustrates the development and current status of privacy laws in US, UK and China as well as analyses the application in social media. In most of time, the right to privacy and the freedom of expression are opposite but not complementary, and the law should protect the right to freedom of speech with a legitimate expectation, but if not, the right to privacy should be more important.

1. Development of the right to privacy

The right to privacy is familiar to people in the recent one hundred years and public is increasingly interested in the right to privacy due to the progress of print media by the late 19th century (Solove et al. 2006, P9-11). The privacy law derived from the action for breach of confidence, but now the independent law of privacy is used by plenty of people to protect their private life and information (Hanna and Dodd 2012, P307).

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the right to privacy in Article 12 that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputatio” (1948) . In 1890, Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis published an article named The Right to Privacy which is regarded as the first implicit declaration of an American right to privacy, and they put forward that privacy is the "right to be let alone"(1890). In ...

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