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I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public

I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. You're in public, you can't avoid some random person from taking your picture. You have a public profile, you post pictures of yourself there, in public. But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? Something about the surprise of it? It feels like a surprise, it feels like something that shouldn't be so easy.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
lumberjack 11y ago
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_... And in most places it still wouldn't be socially acceptable even if it may be legal.
mfoy_ 11y ago
This is just a taste... Now imagine what it must feel like to be a celebrity and have this be an every day occurrence-- hounded by paparazzi.
eCa 11y ago
> But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? It is not voluntary.
Kalium 11y ago
There's a... presumption that this is difficult and that all these disparate services and fragments of identity are distinct and separated. This stunt demonstrates that this is not true. It violates some basic assumptions.
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  Yes, it gets easier and easier to correlate enough metadata and real data to find out many interesting things about many a person.
Karlozkiller 11y ago
I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?
- noja 11y ago
  They're not surprised by that. They are surprised when one of the rules that has held true for the eternity of cities: that you can be semi-anonymous in a crowd, is no longer true.
  - Karlozkiller 11y ago
    In my opinion you still can. What makes this possible? You need a database linking images to names, as well as the face-recognition data. People are freely giving away the images for the database linking it all to further personal data. If they did not do this, creating such a database would still be a massive surveillance effort, albeit probably still possible if someone really wanted to do it and had the sufficient resources. I say it's still possible to stay anonymous if you want to.
    - WireWrap 11y ago
      Various businesses have a "take pictures of customers" policy. Medical offices are one example, due to insurance fraud they say. They typically don't ask. They simply tell the customer that they are about to take a picture and it is over before they know it. When I spot such a camera I stand to the side so they have to ask me to move in front of the camera. Which is when I politely refuse to participate. They don't like that very much. Last time, the person made a "well you might not be able to refuse next time" remark. He may be correct, or not, we'll see. These are cases where the images should never be uploaded to a public database or shared with any other parties. However, given the increasing use of SaaS and cloud providers, exposure to some third-parties is highly likely. Any consumer information hitting the cloud is at high risk of abuse. In addition to those scenarios you have cameras behind ATMs, cameras embedded within grocery store self-checkout lines, etc and so forth. It has already become difficult to control your image and, in some cases, prevent that image from being combined with other personally identifiable information.
mariodiana 11y ago
I think it feels wrong because for all of human history a person could take for granted a degree of anonymity while among strangers, and more and more that seems to be no longer the case. Forever, if someone recognized you, chances are you recognized them. People were either within some extended social circle or they were not, and this social circle was face-to-face. Now, we have something of an arms race going on with respect to anonymity, or the lack thereof. Maybe someone will scan me and identify me. What's my recourse? Either I go about in disguise, or I scan everyone around me in order to equalize things. How could all this not feel strange or wrong? Based on the norms of 10,000 years of human society, it's either a-social or downright anti-social.
- AstralStorm 11y ago
  What if this is actually hypersocial instead? Given enough information, everyone could approach cold reader's peak performance at a glance with additional biography. Sort of creepy - mostly because you can use such information to manipulate people. But like any knowledge it can be used to break ice, strike interesting conversations and broaden one's circle of acquaintances. Or it could be used to build new tribalism. The most problematic part is being able to cut loose and erase the past. This used to be much easier in the past - you just moved far enough and most everybody didn't know what you did.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  > I think it feels wrong because for all of human history a person could take for granted a degree of anonymity I think for most of human history, humans knew the majority of the other humans within travelling distance and people were wary of strangers because there was no reciprocal trust relationship.
barrkel 11y ago
Innocuousness is not a transitive property of shared data. Any individual act of sharing may be OK, but if everybody does the same, then it's easy for much more insidious things to happen. You can't generalize from the particular to the whole because large differences in quantity add up to qualitative differences, and machine processing makes laborious correlations and connections easy to tease out. There's similar problems with automated number plate recognition, public CCTV, non-cash transactions, etc. They all add up to massive potential privacy violations despite being fairly innocent in isolation. Give someone your phone number, and they can't do much more than phone you. Give them a phone book, and they can phone someone given a name and address. Give them a phone book's worth of data in CSV, and they can deanonimize phone call records. Give them a list of phone numbers that have e.g. called a suicide helpline, and now they know the names and addresses of people who are likely to kill themselves. Without machine processing (i.e. with a book rather than CSV), this would be difficult; without people sharing the relatively innocuous detail of their phone number, it wouldn't be possible (leaving social engineering aside).
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Your example suggests a trend - there's much more information hidden in data that it seems on a surface. Many people don't understand it, or don't want to accept it. But it's the nature of the world, and I see no way around it except banning all computation. Because our natural capabilities aided by data-crunching machines are enough to make those "massive privacy violations". So if we want to live with computing, I think we need to learn to live with capabilities of computing and the nature of the casual structure of the physical universe.
WireWrap 11y ago
For one thing, such a scenario would typically involve the uploading of said picture or facial data or faceprint data to a third party. You have no idea how that third-party will use and/or share the information. Some people will not have a public profile picture but they too could be subjected to it.
brador 11y ago
Information asymmetry. They know you, you don't know them.
joe_the_user 11y ago
It makes glad about my zero-photos-of-me-on-the-Internet policy. Also, the neural net may return a certain percent of false positives and there may be no particular way for this guy to tell. The impact is small here and would be larger in other circumstances.
- bigiain 11y ago
  How's that working out for you? I have a significant number of friends who look at me like I'm speaking in Klingon when I tell them I'd rather not be tagged in their Facebook photos.
  - joe_the_user 11y ago
    It works out pretty smoothly really. Occasionally a family member wants to post something but there's seldom a problem. Most of my friends don't post anyone's photo on Facebook even though they use it a lot.
dockerlocker 11y ago
It feels wrong to YOU, maybe because you have something to hide? It is an indicator, that you are having a problem with authorities and you should go to the doctor and speak about that and get some good medication. If you were a good american citizen you would not fear these things, you would be proud of the great tec that Silicon Valley has given the world to fight terrorism. We as Hacker Community believe in the new values of the corporate powers and we do not support such un-aligned opinions like yours. We are proud workers on the front of a perfectly clean new world, were individuals that fear authorities have no place. America is a clean place and you should conform or leave our beloved country! God save America!
roywiggins 11y ago
It's creepy because if someone took a picture of you, combed through enough records to attach your name to it, and then browsed through all your online presence, you'd be creeped out. This just automates the process. If they started knocking on your neighbors doors asking about you, you'd be worried too. It's weird to pry into complete strangers' lives uninvited.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. And I'm trying to figure out why this apparently feels so wrong and creepy to so many commenters here. I don't feel any of that. As far as I'm concerned, it feels... totally normal. Maybe I'm wired wrong or something, but I really don't see anything weird or creepy about learning from publicly available datasets (AKA observing your surroundings?). Nor do I see anything wrong in leveraging computational infrastructure to learn more from those datasets. The way I see it - a hypothetical "creep" who takes a photo of someone and matches it with their public social media profile is fine. Where I draw the line is them attempting to put that into action through stalking, harassment, etc. because it hurts the other party. Trying to break into data sources that are not meant for public is of course a violation of personal privacy, which is wrong. Also, I consider a person with obsessive interest in another to have a problem that probably requires medical attention. Are people so afraid today that the fact that another person notices them makes them uneasy?
- possibility 11y ago
  I think that posting the pictures online like that is actually what's creepy. The matching almost has nothing to do with it. For instance, if he just had the subway photos, or he just had the profile pictures, it would give me a creepy feeling. It feels like an invasion of privacy. Here we even have laws that say you cannot publish someone's picture without their consent. Russia does too. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_... Additionally he quite likely doesn't have permission to post the profile pictures due to copyright.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Ah yes, I agree. Posting someone's photo without permission feels totally wrong to me too.
akerro 11y ago
Because you don't want this: https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

lumberjack 11y ago

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_... And in most places it still wouldn't be socially acceptable even if it may be legal.

mfoy_ 11y ago

This is just a taste... Now imagine what it must feel like to be a celebrity and have this be an every day occurrence-- hounded by paparazzi.

eCa 11y ago

> But some how this feels... wrong, why is that? It is not voluntary.

Kalium 11y ago

There's a... presumption that this is difficult and that all these disparate services and fragments of identity are distinct and separated. This stunt demonstrates that this is not true. It violates some basic assumptions.

AstralStorm 11y ago
Yes, it gets easier and easier to correlate enough metadata and real data to find out many interesting things about many a person.

Karlozkiller 11y ago

I'm more surprised that people are surprised. You provide images to the public with your name and face connected to even more personal data. Why are you surprised that this data can then be used by a third, or even a fourth party?

noja 11y ago
They're not surprised by that. They are surprised when one of the rules that has held true for the eternity of cities: that you can be semi-anonymous in a crowd, is no longer true.
- Karlozkiller 11y ago
  In my opinion you still can. What makes this possible? You need a database linking images to names, as well as the face-recognition data. People are freely giving away the images for the database linking it all to further personal data. If they did not do this, creating such a database would still be a massive surveillance effort, albeit probably still possible if someone really wanted to do it and had the sufficient resources. I say it's still possible to stay anonymous if you want to.
  - WireWrap 11y ago
    Various businesses have a "take pictures of customers" policy. Medical offices are one example, due to insurance fraud they say. They typically don't ask. They simply tell the customer that they are about to take a picture and it is over before they know it. When I spot such a camera I stand to the side so they have to ask me to move in front of the camera. Which is when I politely refuse to participate. They don't like that very much. Last time, the person made a "well you might not be able to refuse next time" remark. He may be correct, or not, we'll see. These are cases where the images should never be uploaded to a public database or shared with any other parties. However, given the increasing use of SaaS and cloud providers, exposure to some third-parties is highly likely. Any consumer information hitting the cloud is at high risk of abuse. In addition to those scenarios you have cameras behind ATMs, cameras embedded within grocery store self-checkout lines, etc and so forth. It has already become difficult to control your image and, in some cases, prevent that image from being combined with other personally identifiable information.

mariodiana 11y ago

I think it feels wrong because for all of human history a person could take for granted a degree of anonymity while among strangers, and more and more that seems to be no longer the case. Forever, if someone recognized you, chances are you recognized them. People were either within some extended social circle or they were not, and this social circle was face-to-face. Now, we have something of an arms race going on with respect to anonymity, or the lack thereof. Maybe someone will scan me and identify me. What's my recourse? Either I go about in disguise, or I scan everyone around me in order to equalize things. How could all this not feel strange or wrong? Based on the norms of 10,000 years of human society, it's either a-social or downright anti-social.

AstralStorm 11y ago
What if this is actually hypersocial instead? Given enough information, everyone could approach cold reader's peak performance at a glance with additional biography. Sort of creepy - mostly because you can use such information to manipulate people. But like any knowledge it can be used to break ice, strike interesting conversations and broaden one's circle of acquaintances. Or it could be used to build new tribalism. The most problematic part is being able to cut loose and erase the past. This used to be much easier in the past - you just moved far enough and most everybody didn't know what you did.
SixSigma 11y ago
> I think it feels wrong because for all of human history a person could take for granted a degree of anonymity I think for most of human history, humans knew the majority of the other humans within travelling distance and people were wary of strangers because there was no reciprocal trust relationship.

barrkel 11y ago

Innocuousness is not a transitive property of shared data. Any individual act of sharing may be OK, but if everybody does the same, then it's easy for much more insidious things to happen. You can't generalize from the particular to the whole because large differences in quantity add up to qualitative differences, and machine processing makes laborious correlations and connections easy to tease out. There's similar problems with automated number plate recognition, public CCTV, non-cash transactions, etc. They all add up to massive potential privacy violations despite being fairly innocent in isolation. Give someone your phone number, and they can't do much more than phone you. Give them a phone book, and they can phone someone given a name and address. Give them a phone book's worth of data in CSV, and they can deanonimize phone call records. Give them a list of phone numbers that have e.g. called a suicide helpline, and now they know the names and addresses of people who are likely to kill themselves. Without machine processing (i.e. with a book rather than CSV), this would be difficult; without people sharing the relatively innocuous detail of their phone number, it wouldn't be possible (leaving social engineering aside).

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Your example suggests a trend - there's much more information hidden in data that it seems on a surface. Many people don't understand it, or don't want to accept it. But it's the nature of the world, and I see no way around it except banning all computation. Because our natural capabilities aided by data-crunching machines are enough to make those "massive privacy violations". So if we want to live with computing, I think we need to learn to live with capabilities of computing and the nature of the casual structure of the physical universe.

WireWrap 11y ago

For one thing, such a scenario would typically involve the uploading of said picture or facial data or faceprint data to a third party. You have no idea how that third-party will use and/or share the information. Some people will not have a public profile picture but they too could be subjected to it.

brador 11y ago

Information asymmetry. They know you, you don't know them.

joe_the_user 11y ago

It makes glad about my zero-photos-of-me-on-the-Internet policy. Also, the neural net may return a certain percent of false positives and there may be no particular way for this guy to tell. The impact is small here and would be larger in other circumstances.

bigiain 11y ago
How's that working out for you? I have a significant number of friends who look at me like I'm speaking in Klingon when I tell them I'd rather not be tagged in their Facebook photos.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  It works out pretty smoothly really. Occasionally a family member wants to post something but there's seldom a problem. Most of my friends don't post anyone's photo on Facebook even though they use it a lot.

dockerlocker 11y ago

It feels wrong to YOU, maybe because you have something to hide? It is an indicator, that you are having a problem with authorities and you should go to the doctor and speak about that and get some good medication. If you were a good american citizen you would not fear these things, you would be proud of the great tec that Silicon Valley has given the world to fight terrorism. We as Hacker Community believe in the new values of the corporate powers and we do not support such un-aligned opinions like yours. We are proud workers on the front of a perfectly clean new world, were individuals that fear authorities have no place. America is a clean place and you should conform or leave our beloved country! God save America!

roywiggins 11y ago

It's creepy because if someone took a picture of you, combed through enough records to attach your name to it, and then browsed through all your online presence, you'd be creeped out. This just automates the process. If they started knocking on your neighbors doors asking about you, you'd be worried too. It's weird to pry into complete strangers' lives uninvited.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

> I keep trying to figure out why this feels so wrong and creepy. And I'm trying to figure out why this apparently feels so wrong and creepy to so many commenters here. I don't feel any of that. As far as I'm concerned, it feels... totally normal. Maybe I'm wired wrong or something, but I really don't see anything weird or creepy about learning from publicly available datasets (AKA observing your surroundings?). Nor do I see anything wrong in leveraging computational infrastructure to learn more from those datasets. The way I see it - a hypothetical "creep" who takes a photo of someone and matches it with their public social media profile is fine. Where I draw the line is them attempting to put that into action through stalking, harassment, etc. because it hurts the other party. Trying to break into data sources that are not meant for public is of course a violation of personal privacy, which is wrong. Also, I consider a person with obsessive interest in another to have a problem that probably requires medical attention. Are people so afraid today that the fact that another person notices them makes them uneasy?

possibility 11y ago
I think that posting the pictures online like that is actually what's creepy. The matching almost has nothing to do with it. For instance, if he just had the subway photos, or he just had the profile pictures, it would give me a creepy feeling. It feels like an invasion of privacy. Here we even have laws that say you cannot publish someone's picture without their consent. Russia does too. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_consent_requirements https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_... Additionally he quite likely doesn't have permission to post the profile pictures due to copyright.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Ah yes, I agree. Posting someone's photo without permission feels totally wrong to me too.

akerro 11y ago

Because you don't want this: https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza