Public figures and the right to private life in the cyber era

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The term “public figure” in legal doctrine, judicial practice, legal normative acts is hard to define. A public figure is often defined by enumerating examples such as politicians, public activists, outstanding athletes, artists, and persons who have a significant impact on the formation of public opinion. In the era of digitalization, when almost everyone has access to the Internet, anyone can “ascend” to the status of a public figure in a short time. In the digital age it is a rare public figure who does not seek to use easily accessible and large-scale information resources (like social networks) to maintain their status. The involvement of any person in the Internet space is great, so that chances of violation of private life increase, and public figures are no exception. Moreover, in the author’s opinion, the latter become most vulnerable to intrusion into their private life, where limits are significantly narrower in comparison with limits of the private life of people who do not play important social roles. At the same time, the mere fact that a person is a public figure does not mean that his right to privacy can be automatically violated. Frequently, freedom of speech and the right to information outweigh the right to private life of a public figure, but the process of evaluating each case should not so much be affected by the status of the person, but rather by the correlation between the rights and the permissible degree of restriction of each of them. However, in order to identify such a correlaion, it is necessary to have an idea of who is a public figure. In this article, the author examines the American doctrine of public figures, German and Russian approaches to the understanding of public figures, as well as the approaches of the European Court of Human Rights. The author proposes abandoning the method of defining the category of “public figure” by listing its various examples, in favor of highlighting the criteria that must be met in order for a person to acquire the legal status of a “public figure”. The list of criteria, in the author’s opinion, can clarify the relationship between private and public spheres and have a positive effect on the legal application of these concepts.

About the author: Alyona Gerashchenko – Ph.D. Student, Faculty Member, Faculty of Law, Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia.

Citation: Gerashchenko A. (2021) Publichnaya figura i pravo na chastnuyu zhizn' v epokhu tsifrovizatsii [Public figures and the right to private life in the cyber era]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 77–95. (In Russian).

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