4 ms·

I can’t speak for the person you’re responding to, but I personally do find a large difference between the risk of fire/explosion and the visibility of an LED.

I can’t speak for the person you’re responding to, but I personally do find a large difference between the risk of fire/explosion and the visibility of an LED. Furthermore I do in fact think that the distinction is big enough to justify legal protection to the end user on the basis that one can burn your house down (and can happen by accident with no user intervention) and the other cannot. Personally I think words like “harm” have concrete meaning outside of language specifically crafted by marketers in order to make awful products more palatable.

tshaddox 5y ago
Do you think it’s controversial whether secretly recording images of someone can sometimes constitute harm? To me, it’s quite clearly the case, so I hadn’t considered the need to present an argument that undisclosed video recording can constitute harm.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Sometimes, yes. But always? No, certainly not. There are perfectly good reasons to want to record someone without their knowledge (e.g. recording law enforcement officers while they are in public). I'm reminded of how phones sold in Japan have a fake shutter sound on their camera apps that you can't disable. Yes, there's a good reason for it (preventing creeps from quietly taking upskirt photos of women on subways), but it also removes the ability to take silent photos for legitimate reasons. But in the general sense, I do find this new Facebook product to be gross and creepy, far worse than Google Glass. And frankly I think a recording light, which will easily become washed out and invisible in sunlight, is a pretty poor attempt at helping maintain the privacy of random people.
- newbie789 5y ago
  Can user behavior be controversial? Absolutely. An exploding battery is not, to my knowledge, “controversial” in that we’ve all agreed that fire is unwanted behavior. This is why I’ve found issue with your battery analogy. I do not believe there is a meaningful equivalence there.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Nice strawman.

tshaddox 5y ago

Do you think it’s controversial whether secretly recording images of someone can sometimes constitute harm? To me, it’s quite clearly the case, so I hadn’t considered the need to present an argument that undisclosed video recording can constitute harm.

kelnos 5y ago
Sometimes, yes. But always? No, certainly not. There are perfectly good reasons to want to record someone without their knowledge (e.g. recording law enforcement officers while they are in public). I'm reminded of how phones sold in Japan have a fake shutter sound on their camera apps that you can't disable. Yes, there's a good reason for it (preventing creeps from quietly taking upskirt photos of women on subways), but it also removes the ability to take silent photos for legitimate reasons. But in the general sense, I do find this new Facebook product to be gross and creepy, far worse than Google Glass. And frankly I think a recording light, which will easily become washed out and invisible in sunlight, is a pretty poor attempt at helping maintain the privacy of random people.
newbie789 5y ago
Can user behavior be controversial? Absolutely. An exploding battery is not, to my knowledge, “controversial” in that we’ve all agreed that fire is unwanted behavior. This is why I’ve found issue with your battery analogy. I do not believe there is a meaningful equivalence there.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
Nice strawman.