Privacy Invasion and False Light

It Hurts

Understanding Invasion of Privacy and False Light

The right to privacy is a serious issue facing our society today with nefarious or offensively intrusive internet violators on significant rise due to their own meddling motivations driving an obsessive compulsion to snoop and dig into the private lives of others for self-serving or opportune purposes. Their covert feeling of anonymity and heightened sense of operating above the law as a netizen of a seemingly lawless universe bolsters their tendency to believe in their perceived omnipotence and that no one will ever know who they are or what they are doing.

Invasion of privacy is considered the intrusion into the personal life of an individual, without legally justified and determined cause, infringing upon an individual's inherent right to and reasonable expectation of privacy, by unreasonably interfering with his or her seclusion, by publicizing information or personal details about his or her private affairs, or by publicizing information that unreasonably places him or her in a false light.

False light is often used in the context of privacy invasion. Its basis is the public presentation and portrayal of an individual that thereby creates a negative and inaccurate impression or belief about that individual. It occurs when information is published about an individual that is based on falsehood or presents a portrayal of that individual in a false light. A victim might file a lawsuit to recover for damage to their reputation. Other identifiers of false light privacy invasion are the portrayal of an individual that is highly offensive to a reasonable person, or the publishing of that portrayal with knowledge or in reckless disregard of whether the information was false or would place the person in a false light. It is often confused with defamation though not the same. Defamation and false light are both separate issues and legal actions.