“Privacy” has Jackson on the attack, as he growls about the increasingly unethical tactics of the media over a grinding beat and the sound of flashing cameras. The song hits as hard as anything on the album, its aggressive tone supplemented by symphonic strings and Slash’s ripping guitar fills. The content is, of course, a Michael Jackson staple. Indeed, it is fair to say that no popular musician of the 20th century was as consistently fierce a media critic as Michael Jackson. As a mass-communicator himself, he understood the enormous power the media held over the public’s perception of reality. Songs like “Privacy” were intended to both alert people to its deception (“You’ve got the people confused…”) and assert his humanity in the face of dehumanizing tactics (“You try to get me to lose the man I really am”).

As on previous media-aimed tracks, Jackson is shrewd enough to make the song about more than himself. In the second verse, he recounts the senseless death of Lady Diana, who was, notoriously, being chased by tabloid reporters when her car fatally crashed in 1996. “My friend was chased and confused, like many others I knew/ But on that cold winter night, my pride was snatched away,”

Jackson’s identification with another “celebrity” hounded by the paparazzi may not elicit much sympathy from the average listener. Yet Jackson clearly feels there is a larger “message” at stake in such a tragedy. His “pride is snatched away” because of a realization that his value as a human being is reduced to how much profit he can generate for a preying media. He is adressing, in other words, a system of enslavement and exploitation. Desperate to avoid this fate, he snakes his fist at the enclsing paparazzi, warning, “Get away from me!”