What does the public think about privacy injunctions?

By Judith Townend

The public interest is at the heart of the debate around privacy injunctions, but do we know what the UK public thinks?

Unfortunately a new ComRes poll for the Independent doesn’t really tell us. While its themes were interesting – asking participants to consider celebrities’ right to privacy – its structure was problematic.

ComRes interviewed 1,001 adults in Great Britain by telephone between 27 and 29 May 2011 and states: “data were weighted to be demographically representative of all GB adults. Data were also weighted by past vote recall”. The full poll can be downloaded at this link [PDF].

The Inforrm media law blog has analysed its methodology in greater detail here and asks what the outcome might have been had the statements been flipped around:

… “Celebrities and sports stars owe their lifestyle to their public profile so they should not complain about intrusion into their private lives“.   Unsurprisingly, 65% agreed with this … the formulation of the question clearly suggests the answer.  If the statement had been – “Celebrities and sports stars have rights to privacy like everyone else” – then it seems likely a substantial proportion of respondents, perhaps a majority, would have agreed.

The introduction to the issue was alarmingly simplistic too. Each statement was introduced like this: “Thinking about super-injunctions, do you agree or disagree with each of the following statements?”

The survey does not appear to have explained its definition of a super injunction, or acknowledged the complexities of this phrase. As I have explained elsewhere, there is a distinction between an anonymous privacy injunction and a secret ‘super’ injunction whose very existence cannot be reported. Lord Neuberger’s recent report made the same distinction.

Inforrm concludes:

The Independent survey appears to have been designed to prove a point.   However, even against the background of the events of the past few weeks, with heavy hints and plentiful references to super-injunctions it is clear that a substantial proportion of the public has not bought into the media account of these issues.

More research is needed. The question is, therefore, how to formulate a survey that breaks free of the media narrative and presents the issues fairly?