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>There is no ethical distinction between installing a camera to record, and watching with one's own eyes and remembering what was seen. Yes there is, simply by

>There is no ethical distinction between installing a camera to record, and watching with one's own eyes and remembering what was seen. Yes there is, simply by the fact that you can't stand in multiple places and remember everything all the time. The problem with mass surveillance is the scale.

logfromblammo 7y ago
Where is the cutoff point, then? At what number of cameras, or cameras per square meter, is it no longer ethical to record what is visible from your property? Exactly one camera? Can you multiplex multiples, so the video feed simulates a person walking around the property? Are the ethics limited by human capabilities, or by human intent? Or it strictly a matter of outcomes?
- homonculus1 7y ago
  If you were to stand on your porch with phone in hand, on the line with the police, and narrate aloud that your neighbor is out getting the paper, and what he looks like, and that he has a strange car in his driveway from the night before, etc. it would be immediately obvious how socially inappropriate and unacceptable this degree of surveillance is. The fact that we have not already codified a specific right or social norm against it is an accident of the fact that nobody has the time to do this manually, and most people don't know or fully realize that their neighbors' doorbells are doing so electronically. Any networked camera continuously filming a field of view off your own property is bad.
  - logfromblammo 7y ago
    It would not be obvious to me that the narrating neighbor is doing anything unacceptable. Your appeal to obviousness (bandwagon fallacy) leaves out any meaningful ethical argument as to why such behavior should be socially unacceptable. One neighbor has a right to record, memorialize, or journalize anything they may observe. The other neighbor has a right to privacy, sometimes. But that does not include those times when they are out and about in public. If you don't want neighbors tattling on your activities, be somewhere where they can't see you without trespassing. There is a case to be made for a right to pseudo-anonymity in public, to not be gratuitously identified by strangers, but this does not apply to your hypothetical. Please take a moment to think past obviousness, and consider the non-obvious implications of establishing a right to privacy based on invisible-to-the-human-eye private property lines and the potentially obfuscated ownership or unpublished tenancy rights in those properties. The only question that needs to be answered is whether the owner of the camera has the right to be where the camera is while it is recording. Opening it up beyond that, to what the camera might be able to capture from there, is a whole new can of worms. That introduces the potential for censorship based on the content of the recordings, a possibility far more unacceptable (to me) than having a relentlessly snitchy, nosy, tattling neighbor. There is definitely an argument to be made against police being able to use all those shared video feeds without getting explicit permission from a judge, but I believe the doorbell-camera owner has an absolute right to record anything it can see, 24-7, and publish all of it, or none of it, to whomever they choose to share it with, or no one at all, to include turning it over to police. It is not meaningfully different from the nosy old fart that watches everyone in the neighborhood from their front window, and then gossips about what everyone is doing to their friends, who are doing exactly the same thing on their own streets. They can tattle to the cops whenever they like. We have always needed to draw the curtains to keep Peeping Tom and Bertha Busybody at bay. Preventing them from looking anywhere off their own property is not an ethical option. We can restrict the police from acting on those tips without independently verifiable evidence, because the cops are nominally public servants. And that's where the focus needs to lie. Restrict the cops from even looking at any of those shared feeds without some record of reasonable suspicion.

logfromblammo 7y ago

Where is the cutoff point, then? At what number of cameras, or cameras per square meter, is it no longer ethical to record what is visible from your property? Exactly one camera? Can you multiplex multiples, so the video feed simulates a person walking around the property? Are the ethics limited by human capabilities, or by human intent? Or it strictly a matter of outcomes?

homonculus1 7y ago
If you were to stand on your porch with phone in hand, on the line with the police, and narrate aloud that your neighbor is out getting the paper, and what he looks like, and that he has a strange car in his driveway from the night before, etc. it would be immediately obvious how socially inappropriate and unacceptable this degree of surveillance is. The fact that we have not already codified a specific right or social norm against it is an accident of the fact that nobody has the time to do this manually, and most people don't know or fully realize that their neighbors' doorbells are doing so electronically. Any networked camera continuously filming a field of view off your own property is bad.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  It would not be obvious to me that the narrating neighbor is doing anything unacceptable. Your appeal to obviousness (bandwagon fallacy) leaves out any meaningful ethical argument as to why such behavior should be socially unacceptable. One neighbor has a right to record, memorialize, or journalize anything they may observe. The other neighbor has a right to privacy, sometimes. But that does not include those times when they are out and about in public. If you don't want neighbors tattling on your activities, be somewhere where they can't see you without trespassing. There is a case to be made for a right to pseudo-anonymity in public, to not be gratuitously identified by strangers, but this does not apply to your hypothetical. Please take a moment to think past obviousness, and consider the non-obvious implications of establishing a right to privacy based on invisible-to-the-human-eye private property lines and the potentially obfuscated ownership or unpublished tenancy rights in those properties. The only question that needs to be answered is whether the owner of the camera has the right to be where the camera is while it is recording. Opening it up beyond that, to what the camera might be able to capture from there, is a whole new can of worms. That introduces the potential for censorship based on the content of the recordings, a possibility far more unacceptable (to me) than having a relentlessly snitchy, nosy, tattling neighbor. There is definitely an argument to be made against police being able to use all those shared video feeds without getting explicit permission from a judge, but I believe the doorbell-camera owner has an absolute right to record anything it can see, 24-7, and publish all of it, or none of it, to whomever they choose to share it with, or no one at all, to include turning it over to police. It is not meaningfully different from the nosy old fart that watches everyone in the neighborhood from their front window, and then gossips about what everyone is doing to their friends, who are doing exactly the same thing on their own streets. They can tattle to the cops whenever they like. We have always needed to draw the curtains to keep Peeping Tom and Bertha Busybody at bay. Preventing them from looking anywhere off their own property is not an ethical option. We can restrict the police from acting on those tips without independently verifiable evidence, because the cops are nominally public servants. And that's where the focus needs to lie. Restrict the cops from even looking at any of those shared feeds without some record of reasonable suspicion.