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Notes -
If you have a social media account under your own name and you share photos about your life, you have consented to those photos being viewed by anyone who cares to view them. As such, you cannot reasonably complain about your privacy being violated when people (including journalists) pull photos of you from a publicly available source when you yourself gave your consent for those photos to be viewed (and, by extension, shared) - up to and including if they use these photos to present you in an unflattering light.
A journalist gaining illicit access to your iCloud account in order to steal naked photos of you which you did not intend for public consumption? Unethical, a legitimate violation of your privacy, illegal in many jurisdictions. A journalist downloading photos which you yourself published on a public Instagram account under your own name? Fair game and entirely legitimate journalistic practice.
All of the above goes double if you are a public figure employed by the government and paid by the taxpayer.
If you share nude photos of yourself with your boyfriend, then your boyfriend shares them with other people without your consent, that is absolutely a violation of your privacy. In many jurisdictions (including my own) it is in fact a criminal offense. But if you post nude photos of yourself on a public platform, you have given your consent for those images to be seen by anyone who cares to see them. Or to put it another way, a porn star who voluntarily consents to appearing in a pornographic film cannot reasonably claim that their privacy was violated when the film is published for public consumption.
Sam Brinton's Instagram is private, although I don't know if this is a recent change. Brinton's Twitter is public, which means that any content posted there is fair game for a journalist to use, including journalists who do not share Brinton's politics.
I don't understand what the second sentence is supposed to mean. Do you mean to imply that Brinton was coerced into sharing photos about their kinks on social media? I would be very surprised indeed if someone put a gun to their head and forced them to post photos about their kinks or whatever on Instagram.
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