19 ms·

The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; but having thei

by yarcob 5y ago

The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; but having their activity tracked online hardly evokes the same reaction. It's weird. What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? But still some people worry so much about that. Whereas only very few people show the same reaction to the fact that Google stores a copy of every word you typed into their search field ever. Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers. We accept that our most private thoughts are being captured, analyzed, sold; but the outrage is about someone taking an anonymous photo of us in a public setting.

mjhagen 5y ago
> Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers. Unencrypted, for them to see?
- yarcob 5y ago
  I hope it's not completely unencrypted, but they definitely have access to iCloud backups and will provide your data to law enforcement.
- developer2 5y ago
  The encryption/decryption keys for your iMessages are stored with Apple, and are accessible to them. If you have iCloud Backup enabled, Apple–and thus law enforcement–can in fact decrypt them. A while back, Apple was aiming to transition to store iMessage backups using a more secure method; ie. the same method that some other content such as Health data is stored, which uses encryption keys derived using local info such as your macOS or iOS password. The FBI requested Apple not to make this change, and Apple complied. Apple runs a great PR game when they talk about privacy, but the reality is nowhere near the same. Some things are fully encrypted so that Apple cannot decrypt, while other things are not safe to store with them. iMessage falls into the latter bucket. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
  - easton 5y ago
    Note that (based on that article), you can disable iCloud Backup and leave Messages in the Cloud enabled, which results in your messages being backed up but the key to decrypting them not being backed up. IIRC, this also results in the key your device uses to decrypt your messages being regenerated so Apple can't go into your backups and pull it out. I disable iCloud Backup because there isn't much that is useful in there that isn't under one of the other checkboxes (Photos is separate, Health is separate, Messages is separate), so my messages should be safe?
    - developer2 5y ago
      Yes, you've got it right.
  - wintermutestwin 5y ago
    There is a huge difference between handing over your messages to a law enforcement agency and using your messages to build detailed advertising profiles of you and then selling you to anyone who will pay. I am not saying that to necessarily advocate for the former, but rather to point out that the latter is the focus of Apple's "PR game"
dale_glass 5y ago
A picture is a very dangerous thing in the wrong hands. A normal picture of a person could still expose something important about them to the wrong party. Eg, "I visit the unsavory part of town", "I'm not really washing my hair", "I'm slacking off", etc. Those are mostly "real-world" concerns. There's the paranoia angle: some stranger wants your picture specifically. What could they have in mind? If you look at least somewhat remarkable, you might end up being part of some meme, or being photoshopped into something. You might be the next Magikarp Guy, if somebody snaps a picture at exactly the wrong moment. With Google the concerns are quite different. While Google pries a lot, so far it's mostly invisible. Google fortunately isn't run by edgy teens looking for the maximum lulz, but by boring accountants looking for profit. So though there's still plenty things to be concerned about, the concern isn't as visceral.
- sysadm1n 5y ago
  > Google fortunately isn't run by edgy teens looking for the maximum lulz, but by boring accountants looking for profit Google is the most targeted company by hackers for sure. Google sit on exabytes of personal data, and it's like hoarding tonnes of dangerous radioactive waste, which if it got in the wrong hands, could be very dangerous. That's why their security is unparalleled. They have a lot of dirt on people.
- pixl97 5y ago
  Heh, Google's concern is far more visceral. Most people get an android phone and leave the defaults on, meaning that not only is all their textual data, like search and location kept by Google, forever. Things like their photos are uploaded from their phone to their account.
  - dale_glass 5y ago
    By "visceral" I mean an innate, feelings-based approach. Big companies' data collection is on the whole quite subtle, and they like it that way. Google will suck up tons of data, digest it, and use it to throw ads at you. But it doesn't really occur to anybody that Google might be interested in looking for people picking their nose in front of their phone's camera, and making a compilation of that to present as "art". If anything of the sort happened, Google would make sure to make an example of whatever rogue employee did that. They like their data collection to be obscure and harmless looking. That's not to say that it is harmless, but finding problems with what Google is doing takes at least a bit of intellectual thought. Meanwhile, an artist secretly recording people is almost certain to have some sort of quirky agenda that's going to immediately turn a large amount of people off, even if it's ultimately silly and non-consequential.
justicezyx 5y ago
Publicly displayed images vs. Only Google can see data I think that's cognitively different concept. And I guess this distinction is also the hidden rationale of rejecting nationalized corporations to have similar power as Google, I.e., when they are nationalized, they suddenly conceptually exposed their information "public". Although in reality, a nationalized Google probably would never reach the same level of perversity as Google...
hellbannedguy 5y ago
A picture is permanent. It seems like my pic is always taken on days I wish I never woke up, or I am Shrek? There is a glimer of hope data about us online might be found, and deleted, one day. I can't stand my picture being taken, especially by strangers. I have given up to DMV, but not Costco. My know it all father retired, and was bored. He decided to buy a camera, and take pictures of the homeless on Market Street. He was big in reveling in other people's missery. (I loved the man, but didn't respect anything about the man.) He didn't understand why the guys were flipping him off, or running away. I told him to stop his "art" project, or take pics of birds. He kept it up, until this huge guy dragged him into a alley, and threw his Canon against the wall. My dad found a new hobby.
- sharken 5y ago
  Good story and a great attitude towards your father, i must admit i don't really understand the need to revel in other people's misery, even though sometimes it's difficult not to. I also don't understand why he did not listen to the advice, but i guess some people can only learn from making a mistake.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Spontaneous portraits, especially street photography has a very revealing side to it, and being able show people this side is exciting and somewhat of a calling for some of us. That's being said, street photography is hard. Especially when you add empathy. All the shots I'm taking are extremely calculated. Trying not to focus on one person squarely, not upsetting someone during the process is extremely energy consuming. If anyone tells me they don't want their face to be shot, I show them the photo. If they hesitate even for a microsecond, that image is gone for good. I'm not a voyeur and have no intention to violate anyone's boundaries even from 100 feet away. Knowing nobody is unhappy because of my hobby lets me sleep better at night.
jrowen 5y ago
One reason is that people generally expect large companies to have a level of scrutiny and process associated with collecting that data, and reasonably trust that it won't be used "improperly." That trust does not extend to "some random guy" hijacking those companies' systems. The other reason is more visceral, in the fact that those photos of themselves and others were displayed semi-publicly. A lot of the tracking that goes on is invisible if you don't think too hard about it (out of sight, out of mind). If they saw a dump of a bunch of people's private messages or search history (even anonymized) posted online for anyone to see, they would likely be similarly spooked.
ben_w 5y ago
Thanks for explicitly pointing out the odd photo-specific reaction. I’ve seen it a few times, but I didn’t make a conscious connection that it might be something low-level visceral.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
It's magical thinking. People don't understand how technology works. More than that - because it's not really about computers. Most people don't understand how reality works. What is information. How reasoning works. What can you infer from observations. They feel (and sometimes, in some places, really think) that a picture is like a piece of their soul. But it isn't. It's just a hash of their phenotype, useful mostly to check if it matches to a person (or another picture of them). It's mostly irrelevant. The soul - that leaks out in all the rest of your digital footprint. The sites you visit, the articles you read, the things you look at when scrolling. The ads you click, the ads you ignore, the products you buy, the products you only check out but don't add to your cart. The messages you send. The posts you comment on. Where you comment on them from, and on what device. How long did you own it, how many other devices do you own, how do your habits differ between those devices. Who you "befriend" or follow on-line, who follows you. Etc. All these things add up to who you are. Taken together, they give a comprehensive look at both your personality and your life circumstances. Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.
- disqard 5y ago
  That last sentence is poetic (the rest is well-articulated too).
- dale_glass 5y ago
  And you get this stuff from? I'd say people understand very well the implications of a photo. If all there was to a photo is showing "the shell that you won in the genetic lottery" there would hardly be a point in photography. I disagree with your assessment. It's part acceptance, part different priorities, and part ignorance. Some people understand what is being gathered and simply accept that as a worthwhile exchange for free stuff. Maybe even a beneficial one (ads are more relevant). Some people just care about different things than you do. Maybe they're very self-conscious about their image and not particularly concerned about their shopping habits being known. And some just aren't aware of the potential for abuse that exists with modern data collection. They think we're still at the early stage, where a company is just trying to figure out which brand of beer to stock, and unaware of modern elaborate profile building and the amount of creepy targeting and manipulation they make possible.
harry8 5y ago
If you actually show people everything that Apple, Google, Facebook keep about them including those examples you'll get a very, very different reaction. One is seen the other is not and is denied. Nobody ever agreed to it. There was never informed consent. Show someone their private stuff and they'll freak out very, very hard indeed.
- belter 5y ago
  And the best experiment to prove it, is this one. Nobody seems to care about all the cameras,sensors, tracking. Some even encourage it in the name of "Safety". But show them the camera and they freak out. "Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg Edit: It seems the link above has now been made private but that was not the case for many years. I will keep the comment as above for the sake of historical accuracy. More details here: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man
  - kemitche 5y ago
    Google Glass is another example of this. Everyone freaked out about it being a camera always at the ready. It was a more obvious camera, and that freaked people out - never mind that, if someone wanted to take a picture surreptitiously, the phone in their pocket was a much better choice. (There were, of course, other factors that a reasonable person could be concerned about with Glass - "glassholes", for one, and providing more data to Google for another)
maccard 5y ago
They're very different situations, and equating the two is like equating piracy to theft; just because they have an overlap doesn't mean they're the same thing. You don't see the same visceral reaction to CCTV, which is much more akin to the mass surveillance performed by Google et Al, but if someone walked up to you in a coffee shop and stuck a USB key into your laptop and said "it's just an anonymous keylogger, don't worry about it" you would likely get the visceral reaction you're talking about.
noisy_boy 5y ago
I think it is also about the expectations in one's mind of what is acceptable. For typical people signing up with Google/Facebook, firstly, the information being scraped is overwhelmingly large/indirect/hidden for them to realize the magnitude/gravity of it. Second, they "mentally" accepted/resigned to that "system" when they signed up. However, in case of someone taking photo of a face without permission, a) and b) above no longer hold true - it is their face - totally tangible, something a lot more personal and something people hold much more dear than the last search query and they never "agreed" to it (neither explicitly nor in their head).
ralfd 5y ago
> Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers. AFAIK 'Messages in iCloud' is enabled when iCloud backup is enabled and can be switched off easily if one only wants to have messages locally on the device.
brainless 5y ago
I feel "my" photo makes it real, personal. I see it, I visualize and comprehend it as me. A curtain of sorts is raised on me. My data is all bits and bytes. Unless some ugly* stuff I said can be picked up and mirrored at me, I do not think there is enough emotional punch as a photo. Edit: it does not have to be ugly, just something to draw immediate emotional reaction.
- Miner49er 5y ago
  It's not just your data though. They probably have your photos, and they share those with people like the NSA, who show your nude photos around the office. That's way worse IMO, but doesn't seem to illicit the same response as this guy's art.
globular-toast 5y ago
People in cities are captured on CCTV hundreds of times per day but nobody seems to mind. I remember some fifteen years ago sitting in pub with a group of people and being the only one who cared that there was a CCTV camera right above our table (it was one of those creepy omni-directional domes). Surveillance Camera Man showed that people have often violent reactions to being overtly filmed by individuals in public. These videos appear to be gone from Youtube now, but if you hadn't seen it he would often just film people do mundane stuff in public like drinking coffee. People always questioned what he was doing, he would tell them "I'm just making a video" and they wouldn't be pleased. If you told someone you were going to install a keylogger on their machine they would almost certainly be against you doing that. But people voluntarily use "cloud" services like Google Docs etc. which are literally keylogging devices. I think there is a strong tendency for people to submit to what they consider to be authority. Some random guy on the street isn't authority. But the government is. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. are. Unfortunately it leads people to spend energy on things that don't matter, like the random guy on the street, and not the things that do matter, like systematic global surveillance.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  The context is a very different one. CCTV is everywhere, but you know Apple is really only interested in security, and maybe keeping track of their own employees. They're not going to randomly make some sort of art project from their footage without lots of discussions with lawyers. I'm pretty sure they'd also make sure to get written consent from everyone involved. We can also expect a company like Apple would be very risk averse in this regard, and keep far away from anything too weird. Some random guy doing their own project going by just whatever seems reasonable to them and installing surveillance software on somebody else's computers isn't really the same sort of thing.
- vidarh 5y ago
  CCTV is impersonal, and rarely watched. Impersonal collection and personal collection evokes very different concerns in people. Impersonal bulk collection is easier to dismiss as "they're not looking for me", whereas the latter raises all kinds of questions about motivation.
- 5y ago
bregma 5y ago
Tell someone there are a billion stars in the universe and they'll believe you. Tell them there is wet paint on a bench and they'll have to touch it to be sure.
- orestarod 5y ago
  The stars can be seen too. Except if you mean "only" a billion stars.
h0nd 5y ago
There are a few things that come to my mind, reading your thoughts and observations. Everyone can do the same activity as I do, go the same places. Buy the same things. But nobody can have the same face as me. In this way, things do not seem comparable. Privacy is at risk on another level. Also, I feel it is in tendency easier to understand the risks and potential abuse of your picture being online as compared to the risks and abuse when google knows what you type into their search field.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; The complaints primarily came from Apple. This artist effectively hijacked their private camera system and then published the resulting images with a personal emphasis on certain individuals. People would have a similar negative reaction if he had hacked into their store security cameras, focused on video of a few people, and then published those stolen images as art. We all know we’re recorded by security cameras when we go into private stores, but we also know that the images won’t cropped down to our faces and posted publicly online as art. Likewise, it would be a different situation if the artist had broken into a company’s private ad targeting database, singled out a few individuals, and posted their tracking information publicly in a way that personally identified them. It really is different when a company uses aggregate data to target ads than if that same data would be published publicly for anyone to see and judge. The latter is a massive privacy violation in front of other individuals. The former is only ever seen by computer algorithms serving us ads without human intervention.
- bogwog 5y ago
  > This artist effectively hijacked their private camera system Private camera system? You mean the webcams that are open to the public in Apple stores?
- pixl97 5y ago
  > The former is only ever seen by computer algorithms serving us ads without human intervention. [assumed]
jimkleiber 5y ago
I wonder if part of it has to do with the expectation (and common practice) that the photo will be shared, whereas the other data is often not shared or at least not shared publicly? I don't know. For me, the photo makes it a discrete moment that I can identify, more tangible, compared to my ISP silently recording every website I visit. I think there are probably many reasons why. I actually think Apple's new commercial for privacy gets at this well, where it has people literally following someone around and snooping on them, asking questions, and I think that visceral surveillance may few much more intrusive than the hidden forms.
bogwog 5y ago
This makes me wonder if it'd be more effective to get people interested in privacy issues if they saw photos of themselves alongside their location, browsing history, etc.
momirlan 5y ago
Maybe I had a bad hair day... People will not appreciate how beautiful I look in "reality"
kova12 5y ago
> What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? Perhaps none, but you never can tell for sure. Not everybody subscribe to this "radical openness" notion, so it's safe to assume people are not feeling comfortable being photographed. By the same logic, what harm is a random picture of you on the nude beach? Probably none, if you are not an alien you are very unlikely to have anything special that nobody seen before. Doesn't mean you have a license to show up there with a camera
ddingus 5y ago
On YT, there are these public photographers, mostly doing cop watch and or audits of public buildings. They exist in a space where the First Amendment and SCOTUS ruling public photography is a protected activity. One evening, I binged on some of these out of the usual board, morbid interest and came to the conclusion it's all about having a target. Being bagged and tagged by a faceless blob, corporate machine, neural network, whatever, is one thing. Kind of goes in to some archive, we know it's there, but we also can't really assign anything other than nebulous intent to the whole affair. In short, there is not much to respond to. And by that, I mean in the human way, face to face, or mind to mind. On the other hand, there is some guy holding a camera! Or she is RIGHT THERE with her camera! Now, there is a person, the whole activity gets personified, and intent seems to flow like magic, as do the questions! People have major boundary issues too. Many confuse standing in a public space while filming private property with actually somehow violating that property. Others do not want to be filmed, and some get it and just move away. Others have control issues and end up the star of the show, despite very clearly not wanting that outcome. So that is one theory. When a big entity does it, somehow we've got a level of trust or acceptance buffering responses. At the least, we don't have a clear target to engage about it, or assign intent to it. When a specific person does this thing, we do have that target, and it all being more human brings out more humanity. Edit: There is also potential guilt, or fear associated with having a specific target. When a specific person is making a record of our activities on the job, or in a public space, there exists a potential for judgement of some kind. Both by the photographer, and or their audience, somehow. We recognize that person could amplify that which would otherwise go ignored in the noise. Now, that person could do exactly nothing too, and our actions in response have a lot to do with whatever outcome ends up out there for public viewing. "You are gonna be famous on YT" packs a punch. People worry! They know they could be the next "Dog Shit Girl" or they worry about something they do, have done, want to do, and whether amplification of that changes risk / reward for it, whatever it is, be it merely inadvisable due to some social norm or other being in play or flat out illegal somehow.
tootie 5y ago
On that note, if I went in to say a restaurant and put audio recording devices underneath all the tables and streamed all the conversations to a hard drive, that would also be perfectly legal since it's no different than eavesdropping from the next table.
grawprog 5y ago
>We accept that our most private thoughts are being captured, analyzed, sold; but the outrage is about someone taking an anonymous photo of us in a public setting https://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-am-an-object-of-internet-ridicule-ask-me-anything/ https://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-am-an-object-of-internet-ri...
xnx 5y ago
Doesn't Google delete your search history after 18 months (unless you ask it not to)? https://www.wired.com/story/google-auto-delete-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-auto-delete-data/
kcimc 5y ago
OP here. Not going to disagree about folks underestimating where the real danger is. But the fear of photography is not unfounded. There are many examples of people suffering from being captured in public settings. Sometimes it is because of their behavior (every "Karen" video), sometimes it is an abuser getting a lead on their ex's location from a tagged Facebook pic. For this project I tried to make sure that I didn't "feature" anyone, so attention was diluted across thousands of photos. When I eventually exhibited the work, I worked with a watercolor artist to create paintings from the photos to further disconnect the work from the customer's identity.

by yarcob 5y ago

mjhagen 5y ago

> Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers. Unencrypted, for them to see?

yarcob 5y ago
I hope it's not completely unencrypted, but they definitely have access to iCloud backups and will provide your data to law enforcement.
developer2 5y ago
The encryption/decryption keys for your iMessages are stored with Apple, and are accessible to them. If you have iCloud Backup enabled, Apple–and thus law enforcement–can in fact decrypt them. A while back, Apple was aiming to transition to store iMessage backups using a more secure method; ie. the same method that some other content such as Health data is stored, which uses encryption keys derived using local info such as your macOS or iOS password. The FBI requested Apple not to make this change, and Apple complied. Apple runs a great PR game when they talk about privacy, but the reality is nowhere near the same. Some things are fully encrypted so that Apple cannot decrypt, while other things are not safe to store with them. iMessage falls into the latter bucket. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
- easton 5y ago
  Note that (based on that article), you can disable iCloud Backup and leave Messages in the Cloud enabled, which results in your messages being backed up but the key to decrypting them not being backed up. IIRC, this also results in the key your device uses to decrypt your messages being regenerated so Apple can't go into your backups and pull it out. I disable iCloud Backup because there isn't much that is useful in there that isn't under one of the other checkboxes (Photos is separate, Health is separate, Messages is separate), so my messages should be safe?
  - developer2 5y ago
    Yes, you've got it right.
- wintermutestwin 5y ago
  There is a huge difference between handing over your messages to a law enforcement agency and using your messages to build detailed advertising profiles of you and then selling you to anyone who will pay. I am not saying that to necessarily advocate for the former, but rather to point out that the latter is the focus of Apple's "PR game"

dale_glass 5y ago

A picture is a very dangerous thing in the wrong hands. A normal picture of a person could still expose something important about them to the wrong party. Eg, "I visit the unsavory part of town", "I'm not really washing my hair", "I'm slacking off", etc. Those are mostly "real-world" concerns. There's the paranoia angle: some stranger wants your picture specifically. What could they have in mind? If you look at least somewhat remarkable, you might end up being part of some meme, or being photoshopped into something. You might be the next Magikarp Guy, if somebody snaps a picture at exactly the wrong moment. With Google the concerns are quite different. While Google pries a lot, so far it's mostly invisible. Google fortunately isn't run by edgy teens looking for the maximum lulz, but by boring accountants looking for profit. So though there's still plenty things to be concerned about, the concern isn't as visceral.

sysadm1n 5y ago
> Google fortunately isn't run by edgy teens looking for the maximum lulz, but by boring accountants looking for profit Google is the most targeted company by hackers for sure. Google sit on exabytes of personal data, and it's like hoarding tonnes of dangerous radioactive waste, which if it got in the wrong hands, could be very dangerous. That's why their security is unparalleled. They have a lot of dirt on people.
pixl97 5y ago
Heh, Google's concern is far more visceral. Most people get an android phone and leave the defaults on, meaning that not only is all their textual data, like search and location kept by Google, forever. Things like their photos are uploaded from their phone to their account.
- dale_glass 5y ago
  By "visceral" I mean an innate, feelings-based approach. Big companies' data collection is on the whole quite subtle, and they like it that way. Google will suck up tons of data, digest it, and use it to throw ads at you. But it doesn't really occur to anybody that Google might be interested in looking for people picking their nose in front of their phone's camera, and making a compilation of that to present as "art". If anything of the sort happened, Google would make sure to make an example of whatever rogue employee did that. They like their data collection to be obscure and harmless looking. That's not to say that it is harmless, but finding problems with what Google is doing takes at least a bit of intellectual thought. Meanwhile, an artist secretly recording people is almost certain to have some sort of quirky agenda that's going to immediately turn a large amount of people off, even if it's ultimately silly and non-consequential.

justicezyx 5y ago

Publicly displayed images vs. Only Google can see data I think that's cognitively different concept. And I guess this distinction is also the hidden rationale of rejecting nationalized corporations to have similar power as Google, I.e., when they are nationalized, they suddenly conceptually exposed their information "public". Although in reality, a nationalized Google probably would never reach the same level of perversity as Google...

hellbannedguy 5y ago

A picture is permanent. It seems like my pic is always taken on days I wish I never woke up, or I am Shrek? There is a glimer of hope data about us online might be found, and deleted, one day. I can't stand my picture being taken, especially by strangers. I have given up to DMV, but not Costco. My know it all father retired, and was bored. He decided to buy a camera, and take pictures of the homeless on Market Street. He was big in reveling in other people's missery. (I loved the man, but didn't respect anything about the man.) He didn't understand why the guys were flipping him off, or running away. I told him to stop his "art" project, or take pics of birds. He kept it up, until this huge guy dragged him into a alley, and threw his Canon against the wall. My dad found a new hobby.

sharken 5y ago
Good story and a great attitude towards your father, i must admit i don't really understand the need to revel in other people's misery, even though sometimes it's difficult not to. I also don't understand why he did not listen to the advice, but i guess some people can only learn from making a mistake.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Spontaneous portraits, especially street photography has a very revealing side to it, and being able show people this side is exciting and somewhat of a calling for some of us. That's being said, street photography is hard. Especially when you add empathy. All the shots I'm taking are extremely calculated. Trying not to focus on one person squarely, not upsetting someone during the process is extremely energy consuming. If anyone tells me they don't want their face to be shot, I show them the photo. If they hesitate even for a microsecond, that image is gone for good. I'm not a voyeur and have no intention to violate anyone's boundaries even from 100 feet away. Knowing nobody is unhappy because of my hobby lets me sleep better at night.

jrowen 5y ago

One reason is that people generally expect large companies to have a level of scrutiny and process associated with collecting that data, and reasonably trust that it won't be used "improperly." That trust does not extend to "some random guy" hijacking those companies' systems. The other reason is more visceral, in the fact that those photos of themselves and others were displayed semi-publicly. A lot of the tracking that goes on is invisible if you don't think too hard about it (out of sight, out of mind). If they saw a dump of a bunch of people's private messages or search history (even anonymized) posted online for anyone to see, they would likely be similarly spooked.

ben_w 5y ago

Thanks for explicitly pointing out the odd photo-specific reaction. I’ve seen it a few times, but I didn’t make a conscious connection that it might be something low-level visceral.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

It's magical thinking. People don't understand how technology works. More than that - because it's not really about computers. Most people don't understand how reality works. What is information. How reasoning works. What can you infer from observations. They feel (and sometimes, in some places, really think) that a picture is like a piece of their soul. But it isn't. It's just a hash of their phenotype, useful mostly to check if it matches to a person (or another picture of them). It's mostly irrelevant. The soul - that leaks out in all the rest of your digital footprint. The sites you visit, the articles you read, the things you look at when scrolling. The ads you click, the ads you ignore, the products you buy, the products you only check out but don't add to your cart. The messages you send. The posts you comment on. Where you comment on them from, and on what device. How long did you own it, how many other devices do you own, how do your habits differ between those devices. Who you "befriend" or follow on-line, who follows you. Etc. All these things add up to who you are. Taken together, they give a comprehensive look at both your personality and your life circumstances. Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.

disqard 5y ago
That last sentence is poetic (the rest is well-articulated too).
dale_glass 5y ago
And you get this stuff from? I'd say people understand very well the implications of a photo. If all there was to a photo is showing "the shell that you won in the genetic lottery" there would hardly be a point in photography. I disagree with your assessment. It's part acceptance, part different priorities, and part ignorance. Some people understand what is being gathered and simply accept that as a worthwhile exchange for free stuff. Maybe even a beneficial one (ads are more relevant). Some people just care about different things than you do. Maybe they're very self-conscious about their image and not particularly concerned about their shopping habits being known. And some just aren't aware of the potential for abuse that exists with modern data collection. They think we're still at the early stage, where a company is just trying to figure out which brand of beer to stock, and unaware of modern elaborate profile building and the amount of creepy targeting and manipulation they make possible.

harry8 5y ago

If you actually show people everything that Apple, Google, Facebook keep about them including those examples you'll get a very, very different reaction. One is seen the other is not and is denied. Nobody ever agreed to it. There was never informed consent. Show someone their private stuff and they'll freak out very, very hard indeed.

belter 5y ago
And the best experiment to prove it, is this one. Nobody seems to care about all the cameras,sensors, tracking. Some even encourage it in the name of "Safety". But show them the camera and they freak out. "Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg Edit: It seems the link above has now been made private but that was not the case for many years. I will keep the comment as above for the sake of historical accuracy. More details here: https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/Surveillance_Camera_Man
- kemitche 5y ago
  Google Glass is another example of this. Everyone freaked out about it being a camera always at the ready. It was a more obvious camera, and that freaked people out - never mind that, if someone wanted to take a picture surreptitiously, the phone in their pocket was a much better choice. (There were, of course, other factors that a reasonable person could be concerned about with Glass - "glassholes", for one, and providing more data to Google for another)

maccard 5y ago

They're very different situations, and equating the two is like equating piracy to theft; just because they have an overlap doesn't mean they're the same thing. You don't see the same visceral reaction to CCTV, which is much more akin to the mass surveillance performed by Google et Al, but if someone walked up to you in a coffee shop and stuck a USB key into your laptop and said "it's just an anonymous keylogger, don't worry about it" you would likely get the visceral reaction you're talking about.

noisy_boy 5y ago

I think it is also about the expectations in one's mind of what is acceptable. For typical people signing up with Google/Facebook, firstly, the information being scraped is overwhelmingly large/indirect/hidden for them to realize the magnitude/gravity of it. Second, they "mentally" accepted/resigned to that "system" when they signed up. However, in case of someone taking photo of a face without permission, a) and b) above no longer hold true - it is their face - totally tangible, something a lot more personal and something people hold much more dear than the last search query and they never "agreed" to it (neither explicitly nor in their head).

ralfd 5y ago

> Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers. AFAIK 'Messages in iCloud' is enabled when iCloud backup is enabled and can be switched off easily if one only wants to have messages locally on the device.

brainless 5y ago

I feel "my" photo makes it real, personal. I see it, I visualize and comprehend it as me. A curtain of sorts is raised on me. My data is all bits and bytes. Unless some ugly* stuff I said can be picked up and mirrored at me, I do not think there is enough emotional punch as a photo. Edit: it does not have to be ugly, just something to draw immediate emotional reaction.

Miner49er 5y ago
It's not just your data though. They probably have your photos, and they share those with people like the NSA, who show your nude photos around the office. That's way worse IMO, but doesn't seem to illicit the same response as this guy's art.

globular-toast 5y ago

People in cities are captured on CCTV hundreds of times per day but nobody seems to mind. I remember some fifteen years ago sitting in pub with a group of people and being the only one who cared that there was a CCTV camera right above our table (it was one of those creepy omni-directional domes). Surveillance Camera Man showed that people have often violent reactions to being overtly filmed by individuals in public. These videos appear to be gone from Youtube now, but if you hadn't seen it he would often just film people do mundane stuff in public like drinking coffee. People always questioned what he was doing, he would tell them "I'm just making a video" and they wouldn't be pleased. If you told someone you were going to install a keylogger on their machine they would almost certainly be against you doing that. But people voluntarily use "cloud" services like Google Docs etc. which are literally keylogging devices. I think there is a strong tendency for people to submit to what they consider to be authority. Some random guy on the street isn't authority. But the government is. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. are. Unfortunately it leads people to spend energy on things that don't matter, like the random guy on the street, and not the things that do matter, like systematic global surveillance.

dale_glass 5y ago
The context is a very different one. CCTV is everywhere, but you know Apple is really only interested in security, and maybe keeping track of their own employees. They're not going to randomly make some sort of art project from their footage without lots of discussions with lawyers. I'm pretty sure they'd also make sure to get written consent from everyone involved. We can also expect a company like Apple would be very risk averse in this regard, and keep far away from anything too weird. Some random guy doing their own project going by just whatever seems reasonable to them and installing surveillance software on somebody else's computers isn't really the same sort of thing.
vidarh 5y ago
CCTV is impersonal, and rarely watched. Impersonal collection and personal collection evokes very different concerns in people. Impersonal bulk collection is easier to dismiss as "they're not looking for me", whereas the latter raises all kinds of questions about motivation.
5y ago

bregma 5y ago

Tell someone there are a billion stars in the universe and they'll believe you. Tell them there is wet paint on a bench and they'll have to touch it to be sure.

orestarod 5y ago
The stars can be seen too. Except if you mean "only" a billion stars.

h0nd 5y ago

There are a few things that come to my mind, reading your thoughts and observations. Everyone can do the same activity as I do, go the same places. Buy the same things. But nobody can have the same face as me. In this way, things do not seem comparable. Privacy is at risk on another level. Also, I feel it is in tendency easier to understand the risks and potential abuse of your picture being online as compared to the risks and abuse when google knows what you type into their search field.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission; The complaints primarily came from Apple. This artist effectively hijacked their private camera system and then published the resulting images with a personal emphasis on certain individuals. People would have a similar negative reaction if he had hacked into their store security cameras, focused on video of a few people, and then published those stolen images as art. We all know we’re recorded by security cameras when we go into private stores, but we also know that the images won’t cropped down to our faces and posted publicly online as art. Likewise, it would be a different situation if the artist had broken into a company’s private ad targeting database, singled out a few individuals, and posted their tracking information publicly in a way that personally identified them. It really is different when a company uses aggregate data to target ads than if that same data would be published publicly for anyone to see and judge. The latter is a massive privacy violation in front of other individuals. The former is only ever seen by computer algorithms serving us ads without human intervention.

bogwog 5y ago
> This artist effectively hijacked their private camera system Private camera system? You mean the webcams that are open to the public in Apple stores?
pixl97 5y ago
> The former is only ever seen by computer algorithms serving us ads without human intervention. [assumed]

jimkleiber 5y ago

I wonder if part of it has to do with the expectation (and common practice) that the photo will be shared, whereas the other data is often not shared or at least not shared publicly? I don't know. For me, the photo makes it a discrete moment that I can identify, more tangible, compared to my ISP silently recording every website I visit. I think there are probably many reasons why. I actually think Apple's new commercial for privacy gets at this well, where it has people literally following someone around and snooping on them, asking questions, and I think that visceral surveillance may few much more intrusive than the hidden forms.

bogwog 5y ago

This makes me wonder if it'd be more effective to get people interested in privacy issues if they saw photos of themselves alongside their location, browsing history, etc.

momirlan 5y ago

Maybe I had a bad hair day... People will not appreciate how beautiful I look in "reality"

kova12 5y ago

> What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? Perhaps none, but you never can tell for sure. Not everybody subscribe to this "radical openness" notion, so it's safe to assume people are not feeling comfortable being photographed. By the same logic, what harm is a random picture of you on the nude beach? Probably none, if you are not an alien you are very unlikely to have anything special that nobody seen before. Doesn't mean you have a license to show up there with a camera

ddingus 5y ago

On YT, there are these public photographers, mostly doing cop watch and or audits of public buildings. They exist in a space where the First Amendment and SCOTUS ruling public photography is a protected activity. One evening, I binged on some of these out of the usual board, morbid interest and came to the conclusion it's all about having a target. Being bagged and tagged by a faceless blob, corporate machine, neural network, whatever, is one thing. Kind of goes in to some archive, we know it's there, but we also can't really assign anything other than nebulous intent to the whole affair. In short, there is not much to respond to. And by that, I mean in the human way, face to face, or mind to mind. On the other hand, there is some guy holding a camera! Or she is RIGHT THERE with her camera! Now, there is a person, the whole activity gets personified, and intent seems to flow like magic, as do the questions! People have major boundary issues too. Many confuse standing in a public space while filming private property with actually somehow violating that property. Others do not want to be filmed, and some get it and just move away. Others have control issues and end up the star of the show, despite very clearly not wanting that outcome. So that is one theory. When a big entity does it, somehow we've got a level of trust or acceptance buffering responses. At the least, we don't have a clear target to engage about it, or assign intent to it. When a specific person does this thing, we do have that target, and it all being more human brings out more humanity. Edit: There is also potential guilt, or fear associated with having a specific target. When a specific person is making a record of our activities on the job, or in a public space, there exists a potential for judgement of some kind. Both by the photographer, and or their audience, somehow. We recognize that person could amplify that which would otherwise go ignored in the noise. Now, that person could do exactly nothing too, and our actions in response have a lot to do with whatever outcome ends up out there for public viewing. "You are gonna be famous on YT" packs a punch. People worry! They know they could be the next "Dog Shit Girl" or they worry about something they do, have done, want to do, and whether amplification of that changes risk / reward for it, whatever it is, be it merely inadvisable due to some social norm or other being in play or flat out illegal somehow.

tootie 5y ago

On that note, if I went in to say a restaurant and put audio recording devices underneath all the tables and streamed all the conversations to a hard drive, that would also be perfectly legal since it's no different than eavesdropping from the next table.

grawprog 5y ago

>We accept that our most private thoughts are being captured, analyzed, sold; but the outrage is about someone taking an anonymous photo of us in a public setting https://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-am-an-object-of-internet-ridicule-ask-me-anything/ https://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-am-an-object-of-internet-ri...

xnx 5y ago

Doesn't Google delete your search history after 18 months (unless you ask it not to)? https://www.wired.com/story/google-auto-delete-data/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-auto-delete-data/

kcimc 5y ago

OP here. Not going to disagree about folks underestimating where the real danger is. But the fear of photography is not unfounded. There are many examples of people suffering from being captured in public settings. Sometimes it is because of their behavior (every "Karen" video), sometimes it is an abuser getting a lead on their ex's location from a tagged Facebook pic. For this project I tried to make sure that I didn't "feature" anyone, so attention was diluted across thousands of photos. When I eventually exhibited the work, I worked with a watercolor artist to create paintings from the photos to further disconnect the work from the customer's identity.