Well, it depends on which public person we are talking about.
A random nobody? Yeah, privacy is important for them.
Someone running for president, or someone who is a CEO of one of the most valuable companies in the world? I don't really care much about their privacy, in either circumstance.
Who will get justice or recompense by knowing that?
What future benefits or change of course will this bring for you, or me, or society?
Don't get me wrong, I don't care about this guy's privacy either -- plus he's dead, so privacy is mostly moot -- but it's hard to see what anyone stands to gain from airing inconsequential medical history.
Agreed.
> As an officer of a public corporation, how much privacy can one expect?
So we should violate his rights without repercussion? Lost me.
If I invest something in your company, and you are sick, should I know it?
Either public figures deserve a measure of privacy or they don't.
The real answer is that it depends. If a public figure is abusing their position, then yes, it is in the public interest to know about this abuse of power.
Imagine for a second if every politician’s financial history for all of their financial accounts were on an immutable ledger. That is something that is desirable, though it violates those individuals’ privacy. In this case we would say the public interest supersedes their right to privacy.
If the standard boils down to there being a journalistic interest in publishing relevant information about a public figure in relation to their abuse of power then I'm not sure how possibly-faked medical records pass that test.
Don't put words in the other person's mouth.
Instead, what people are saying is that if someone has a huge amount of power, then we don't really care about their privacy.
Someone running a blog does not have a huge amount of power.
Someone running a trillion dollar company, or running or president, or whatever, does have a huge amount of power.
Thats the difference.
I agree that Steve Jobs is more powerful than even an influential blogger, but they are both public figures. Who exactly is allowed to do the calculus about how much private information is appropriate to publish about someone according to their level of power? To me it seems to be a binary: are they a public figure or not.
When it's a breach of journalistic ethics to publish information about a blogger that's provided on or linked to from said blog (I think it is a breach, he made a specific request not to) it's much more egregious to publish an apparently forged health record of a CEO.
At no point do I think that not caring about someone's privacy means it's acceptable to publish false information about them.
It doesn't have to be binary. Instead, we can say that the more power someone has, the more it is ok to reveal info about them.
You can pick public figure, but I wouldn't do that.
> Who exactly is allowed to do the calculus
Anyone at all times. That's how society works. Everyone has their own opinions.
I don't agree with your binary opinion though.
> Of a CEO
CEOs have lots of power. They don't need to be protected as much as everyone else in the world.
"(...) These specimens are significant not only because they are the oldest specimens of the virus known to cause AIDS, but because they show that the virus already had an extensive amount of genetic diversity in 1960.[10] This suggests the virus had either undergone recombination or been circulating for years or perhaps decades in the Kinshasa population. (...)"
Additionally,
Richard Edwin Graves Jr., a 28-year-old World War II veteran who had been stationed in the Solomon Islands, died on 26 July 1952 in Memphis, Tennessee with pneumocystis pneumonia, CMV and what some authors suggest are a sufficient number of opportunistic infections for a clinical course suggestive of an AIDS diagnosis.[8][9]
Sadayo Fujisawa, a sixty-year-old Japanese-Canadian woman, died in Montreal on 28 June 1945 of pneumocystis pneumonia with Human cytomegalovirus (CMV), diarrhea, and wasting, a group of symptoms which some authors conclude would have led to an automatic diagnosis of AIDS in the early 1980s.[6][7]
The virus was already circulating globally in the early 1900s.
The genetic diversity might be indicative of widerspread infection in sub-saharan Africa, and then two immuno-comprimised cases, are not specifically indicative of HIV.
...and then this statement has absolutely no basis in evidence: "The virus was already circulating globally in the early 1900s."