Annie Tsai

Sitting squarely at the intersection of technology, culture, and life is the Jumbotron at a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts. In case you were hiding out under a rock or joyously offline, the CEO and Chief People Officer of unicorn AI software company Astronomer (intentionally leaving names out because the “moment” is in this context not actually about their moment) were caught on the Kiss Cam in a questionable embrace causing them to immediately duck and hide from the cameras where Chris Marten called them out on either having an affair or being extremely shy, both executives were placed on leave, and the CEO resigned before the weekend was over. 

Tens of millions of views later, the pop cultureness of the moment has shined over and over again. Baseball games pivoted their own Kiss Cams to emulate the moment with mascots. Brands went to town in slightly and entirely inappropriate ways to capitalize on the moment with giveaways for concert tickets for “you and your actual partner”. Hell, even Miss Piggy got in on the meme train. Sorry Kermit.

In a media landscape that rarely gives us pervasively shared cultural moments anymore, this one came close not because of the drama, but I want to say because it raised a universally uncomfortable question that we have been dealing with since the dawn of the paparazzi: What should we expect, from a privacy standpoint, in the public space? 

When you leave your home, your voice, your face, your gestures, your choices – they belong to you. But now, that content can be created from anywhere, by anyone, and posted anywhere, by anyone, for everyone to see and have an opinion on. And the dawn of generative AI brings these questions even more into the forefront.

We’ve landed in an era where the only thing more public than being in public is being  unknowingly turned into content without your consent – from a moment, to a Jumbotron, to the Internet, to the world. 

On one side, there is the ethical question of privacy and ownership of one’s actions, regardless of where we are. On the other hand, the technical answer to “should we expect privacy in public?” is no. You give that up the moment you walk out your front door. But the human answer (the one that we too often forget to consider) is, hopefully, yes. 

At least, I think we all hope the answer is yes from a human standpoint. We hope that being out in the world – going to the grocery store, filling your tank of gas, taking your kid for a bike ride – doesn’t automatically mean that you are on display. But should we even be asking if the expectation of privacy is legitimate? Should the question really be this: is the lack of expectation of privacy reshaping the role of the public space itself? 

Public space is supposed to be where we reconnect with the world beyond our curated digital lives. It’s where kids kick soccer balls on too-dry lawns, where retirees sit on benches reading actual newspapers, where couples both fall in love and argue on the walk home from brunch, where parents with young kids let those kids work out their big feelings because that’s what they need to do as a foundation of developing executive function. It’s where we stretch out and exist in that rare state of simply being present. 

But it’s hard to do all of those things when you’re also trying to avoid becoming a meme. The camera has become a tool of accountability, but it’s also become a weapon of humiliation, a tool of voyeurism, and a delivery mechanism for virality. You could be minding your own business, laughing too loud, wearing something odd, or showing a little affection in the wrong place and the wrong time… and suddenly, it’s not your moment anymore. You become someone else’s content – a moment of note in someone else’s life that is rarely framed with empathy. 

More often than not, it’s a vulnerable moment – someone crying in their car, a couple caught in a moment and tagged into infamy, a teenager making a mistake for the world to judge, someone with a mental health episode on a train. It is a power imbalance where the subject largely doesn’t have the ability to make the moment mean nothing more than one lesson of many in their lives. 

In the end, no. You can’t expect privacy in public. But, we should expect decorum from each other. While we cannot build fences tall enough to protect us from pixels and unlimited data plans, we can hope that people know that just because someone can record you doesn’t mean they should, and we must hold on to that we’re all still trying to exist in the world and share space, together.