Invasion of Kohli's privacy

Virat Kohli has over 27 crore followers on the two biggest social media platforms — if they were assigned a geographical nation, his followers would threaten to overtake Indonesia as the fourth-most populous country in the world. Added to his cricket fans are fans of the Hindi cinema, for he is married to actor Anushka Sharma. With that kind of a fan base, in India and across the world — especially in countries with a large migrant Indian population — Kohli is unlikely to ever have the privacy of enjoying a quiet walk in, say London or Sydney or even Toronto. But privacy in an exclusive hotel in sleepy Perth is the least Kohli or anyone else deserves. However, Kohli’s trust in the hotel management was breached when someone — presumably a hotel employee or contractor — entered his room in his absence, made a video recording of the room and Kohli’s belongings, and posted it on social media. Kohli was ‘appalled’ and felt ‘paranoid about my privacy’.

Do celebrities have any rights to privacy? Martin Cooper, the man who made the first cellular phone call in 1973, said in 2010: ‘Privacy is a thing of the past.’ And Cooper was merely talking about being connected all the time due to the cellphone — the invasion of people’s privacy through high-quality cameras on mobile phones was yet to take place. It’s estimated that there are 6.6 billion smartphone users in the world currently. These phones give the users the ability to record high-quality videos and photographs, and inexpensive and superfast Internet connections enable them to be posted on social media almost instantly. This has turned ordinary people into professional YouTubers and TikTokers, many of them willing to go to any length to make a video ‘viral’ and gain ‘followers’. Twenty-five years after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, everyone is potential paparazzi.

Social media gives Kohli and other celebrities the ability to connect with the fans on their own terms — they can choose to reveal only certain vignettes from their personal lives. For amateur paparazzi, Kohli and his like are fair game, in the stadium or the street. But stealing into his hotel room to make a video recording is disturbing and clearly unacceptable. Kohli may be a very public personality, but his right to privacy has to be absolute.