Media Debates - do celebrities deserve a private life?

I found this debate on a blog called Helium.com

This a tricky question as the meaning of the word "celebrity" has changed in recent years. A celebrity no longer needs to have any real talent for anything. They do not have to act, sing, or dance in order for the public to pay attention to them. They can simply be famous for "being famous". What a world we live in!

The celebrities who parade through our magazines nowadays are, more often than not, people who you would not even stop in the street and have a chat with if they were your next door neighbour. These are people who have gotten their faces in the paper for being obnoxious, rude, or unbelievably stupid. Of course, there are still plenty of celebrities out there who became famous the old fashioned way and just took their clothes off. These people are not good at anything, not good role models, and certainly no good to be used as icons for how to get famous. This group of celebrities, in my opinion, have less of a right for privacy. They do have some rights as they are still human beings, and therefore entitled to the same rights as any of the rest of us, but these are the people who want the public to know everything they do. These are the people who sell the press the rights to every party, event, and special moment in their lives. These are the people who deserve little privacy, and even less respect, because nothing is sacred to them. When you have people willing to go on television and have a diet "doctor" wade through what was once in their colon, you could argue these people give up their rights for privacy. However, the paparazzi have taken the public's need to know everything about famous people to a new, disgusting level. In the old days we got our background on celebrity's lives from interviews they willingly gave to magazines, radios, and television chat show hosts. For a long time this seemed to satisfy us. Then for some reason, according to the tabloid papers and magazines, we suddenly needed to see famous people with no makeup, at the supermarket, and in one magazine a few years ago; a four page pull out of celebrities picking up their dog poop. Who doesn't need to see that image as they're having their lunch and thumbing through a mag?

Then you have the top end of the celebrity tree. The ones that is actually famous for acting, singing, etc. These people, for the most part, got to where they are by doing their job. They entertain us. They give interviews. They tell us what they want us to know about themselves, and then they go home and try to have a normal life with their friends and families. And what is wrong with that? When we finish our jobs do we want the customers coming home after us, begging us to let them into our private lives? Of course not. What's more, we would think they were insane, as I would imagine a lot of celebrities think about the general public's lust for all things celebrity. These people are just people. They do everything we do; the only difference is they have more money than us. That's it. These people do deserve a level of privacy. They deserve as much privacy as any of us do in my view. Having said that, I'm well aware that some celebrities, from the top and bottom end of the scale, court publicity, and these people know what they are getting themselves into. If they want to be photographed falling out of nightclubs, that's their own choice. The line is drawn when you have paparazzi going through famous people's rubbish bins, following them when they go to the park for a jog, and more seriously, taking pictures of their children, who are completely innocent and have no desire to have light bulbs flashing in their faces 24/7. Basically, everyone deserves privacy, the richest man in the world and the homeless guy in the street. It is a basic human right.