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I don't understand why public is considered "lack a reasonable expectation of privacy". In Switzerland this only applies if you are in public at a large gather

I don't understand why public is considered "lack a reasonable expectation of privacy". In Switzerland this only applies if you are in public at a large gathering or event where the use of cameras etc. is expected. In any other situation in public, if you single out a specific person (even if their face is not visible but they are identifiable by clothing/tattoo or vehicle registration etc.) in a video you are violating their privacy and are required to get consent. This consent can also be revoked at any time later.

hug 3y ago
I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to come up with how to eloquently put this in English and I cannot. Maybe English lacks the appropriate terminology to express the difference between privacy and publicity within the expanded scope of current technology. It’s my only language, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it, but I’m absolutely stumped as to how you’d exactly word exactly what you’re not understanding. I feel like it’s a case of the language we speak shaping our interpretation of what is just, and doing so in such a way that it’s hard to even explain what we’re now missing. The problem, in so many words, is that these days the act of being in public is public. That’s a weird sentence to write, and I’m not sure how else to put it. Previously, the memory of any public act was restricted to those who were there to observe it at the time. Any acts in public were by themselves public. Acts in private were private. There was a third quasi-state: anonymous isn’t the right word, because you were always identifiable, but by happenstance you just weren’t. You were in public, but not publicised. Recognisable, but not recognised. Observable, but not observed. By definition though you were always in public, never in private. Modern technology has somewhat erased the third state by slowly but surely eroding the cases in which you are not observed, tracked, recorded, or identified, by some technology or another. It’s made public very public, if you excuse the unavoidable pleonasm. There’s no good word for the third state, that I can think of, and it makes me sad.
- frankfrankfrank 3y ago
  The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language. Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech? For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course. Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone? These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not. And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy. The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.
  - gmane 3y ago
    Wait, why are you drawing the line at the 12th amendment and not the 16th?
  - hug 3y ago
    To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”. In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”. Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down? That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down? This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
    - godelski 3y ago
      If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.
- Libcat99 3y ago
  When you are in a physical space, you can look around you and somewhat reliably observe who can see you, hear you, and observe your actions. You've always then had the choice to base your actions and your speech on who will observe them, with the further knowledge that they might go on to share this with others. The difference isn't that what you do now can be shared. It's the ease of sharing and the fidelity with which it can be shared.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I mostly agree, but there's part that you're missing. Ease is a critical issue, but the capacity to record was substantially different back then too, and thus the validity of what was being shared. There's a big difference in someone claiming you said something vs someone having a recording of it. 20 years ago everyone wasn't walking around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. It is not only the ease in sharing and identifying, but even the base capacity to perform the action in the first place. If you were being recorded on video in the past, you'd likely notice the bulky camcorder mounted on some guy's shoulder. (not even mentioning that resolution was very different and depth of field is not a negligible). 20 years ago you did not have a reasonable expectation to be recorded in the public physical space. This is contingent upon the probability of someone being able to perform an action, and even more so without you being aware of said action being performed. That wasn't that long ago...
    - Libcat99 3y ago
      That's what I was getting at with the fidelity attribute. Before you could observe an event and remember it (poorly) and share it (slowly) but technology, for better or worse, has greatly increased the possible fidelity of that memory, which can now shared endlessly without losing quality.
- specialist 3y ago
  Agreed. I also get flummoxed whenever I try to talk about this stuff. Further, I've only recently appreciated that our modern folk understanding of right to privacy has eclipsed its twin, the right to personal autonomy. The development of the doctrine regarding the tort of "invasion of privacy" was largely spurred by the Warren and Brandeis article, "The Right to Privacy". In it, they explain why they wrote the article in its introduction: "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society". ... They then clarify their goals: "It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States#Brandeis_and_Warren_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta... Brandeis & Warren were motivated by the evils of "yellow journalism", the social media of its day. "The U.S Constitution safeguards the rights of Americans to privacy and personal autonomy. Although the Constitution does not explicitly provide for such rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution protect these rights, specifically in the areas of marriage, procreation, abortion, private consensual homosexual activity, and medical treatment." https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-rights/ https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right... I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy (h/t @sschueller). Will definitely learn more about their system. My hunch is consent is akin to respecting another's autonomy.
  - godelski 3y ago
    > I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the EU laws contingent upon legality? Article 8.2 > Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned __or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.__ Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. I mean we can take this in good faith, but at the same time Article 20 says everyone is equal in the law but there are several royal families and constitutions that make said families above the law. I love the idea in principle (and far better than nothing) but I personally am not fully trusting. It is, after all, our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.
- gspencley 3y ago
  The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media. I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.
  - LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!
- Pent 3y ago
  >the act of being in public is public the act of being in public may be widely distributed
kmlx 3y ago
so it’s illegal to film someone on a street in switzerland and post it online?
- wongarsu 3y ago
  This is the norm in Europe. Filming a crowd is fine, making a picture of the Eiffel tower with people around it is fine, filming a specific person and publishing it without their consent generally isn't. "Generally" because obviously it gets more interesting in the specifics of when it is ok, but those are exceptions similar to how copyright has exceptions.
  - JustBreath 3y ago
    I guess that explains the distinct lack of public freakout videos from Europe.
    - remix2000 3y ago
      I think that's more related to the fact that most Europeans normally speak languages other than English.
      - JustBreath 3y ago
        A bit difficult to post them when they are illegal, no?
        remix2000 3y ago
        Not at all actually. There is a constant stream of compromising material posted online in Europe. It's a huge problem actually, because it's notoriously hard to get such stuff taken down, as the authorities simply do not care.
  - randombits0 3y ago
    “THE TOWER ILLUMINATED Controlled use The various illuminations of the Eiffel Tower (golden illumination, twinkling, beacon and events lighting) are protected. The use of the image of the Eiffel Tower at night is therefore subject to prior authorisation by the SETE. This use is subject to payment of rights, the amount of which is determined by the intended use, the media plan, etc.” https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel-tower https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...
rlpb 3y ago
I think there's a distinction between being recorded in the first place, and what the recording might be used for in the future. I think it's OK to permit a recording to take place in a public place without explicit consent, but still require consent to use that recording in (for example) publishing it where someone is a feature in that publication (as opposed to someone who happens to be in the background and remains otherwise unidentified). Nowadays technology might mean that someone anonymous gets identified by a third party using automation. So it will become public knowledge, indexable on the person, as to where they were and what they were doing. But that was going to happen anyway. I'm not sure restricting recordings in the first place is really going to stop that.
- godelski 3y ago
  I think the problem is that the environment has changed and people are applying those changes post hoc to the previous environment and when laws were written. Things have changed a lot and I think we need to act accordingly. Continuing as if it all is the same is like boiling a frog, and it is surprising how fast you can turn up the heat. It may seem drastic, but I have seriously considered messaging dang to nuke this account. Not just delete it, but purge all text as well. A strong divorce from the standards, but that is because [deleted] used to be reasonably sufficient to hide one's identity. We now live in a world where I can reasonably expect to be deanonymized by my words alone and that it is not unlikely that this capacity will be in the hands of the public in the next 5-10 years, along with entire copies of the internet. I do think what we've seen with digging up old tweets will take on a new and pervasive form (likely with even more error). But going back to specifically recording... The truth is that we live in a _very_ different world than when these laws were set up. The idea of reasonable expectation was very different because you wouldn't reasonably expect to walk down the street being recorded since cameras were bulky, expensive, and uncommon. Now every single person has one in their pockets, most businesses are recording you, you're being recorded from airplanes in the sky[0], and not too long from now satellites will (governments already have this capacity but commercial is near there[1]). You didn't have a reasonable expectation for the person standing next to you to be capable of recording your conversation. It was possible for them to wear "a wire" but the likelihood was very low. Likelihood being low is equivalent to "reasonable expectation." The reasonable expectation of not being recorded didn't come from being hidden or out of sight, it came from the fact that the technology either didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Not it is ubiquitous. And despite it seeming so normal, most of this change happened in the last 20 years. But we're getting to the next paradigm shift, which makes all the above even more pervasive. ML/AI. I say this as someone that works in ML/AI and loves the field with a passion (you'll see me discuss it a lot here). But the technology also has downsides (commonly referred to as "malicious AI"). It isn't AGI, it is the ML that already exists. We can identify faces in a crowd and track them across different videos. We can take that 2 pixel person, segment it, and track it (done manually in the radiolab referenced in [0]). We can identify a person by the way that they walk (gait recognition[2]). We can track you by your wifi and bluetooth signal within a building. And so much more. This technology has supercharged the surveillance ecosystem (not somewhere I work in, obviously) and you bet it is being used by countries who don't have the best human rights records (let's not make this a (who's) dick (is the ugliest) measuring contest). Things have changed well beyond what we could have reasonably assumed 20 years ago, even 10. Now, it is not unreasonable to believe that such systems will also perform on the web and that your text is likely identified by you patterns, not just your fingerprint. And this is really it. This stuff is so prolific that we've erased our memory of the past and re-framed this "normal" behavior as applicable to the past and try to justify it. 20 years ago you could walk down the street and reasonably assume that you would not show up on any single camera. Moreso, you could reasonably assume that if you did, you wouldn't show up on many. That that video was unlikely to make it to the internet. And that that video would likely be low grade and unable to identify you. These are all different things, but combined they sum to the expectation that there would not be a record of your movement contingent upon your ability to be identified (same applies to the internet and our chat forums in a similar line of reasoning). __STOP JUSTIFYING "REASONABLE EXPECTATION"__ without recognizing that the ecosystem has rapidly changed and is significantly different from when those laws were written. You are not making a strong argument but rather just reinforcing the surveillance paranoia (as in, people who are paranoid[3] about surveillance will increase said paranoia due to increased relaxation coupled with "nothing to hide" mentality that enables said surveillance). === TLDR === Just because you were in public didn't mean you'd reasonably expect to be recorded. The ecosystem has rapidly changed and we need to recognize this. 10-20 years ago you didn't have a reasonable expectation to be recorded (video or audio) in public as {government,corporate,civilian} recording capabilities were far less. [0] Note that this is 2016 and has only grown since then. If you don't like buzzfeed (I just quick googled) Radiolab has 2 episodes on it ("Eye in the Sky"). https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-t... [1] Planet is getting ready to deploy a 30cm resolution (person = ~2 pixels) constellation called Pelican. It is not real time! But it shouldn't be unreasonable to believe it will be in the future. Current resolutions can already clearly identify cars. https://www.planet.com/products/pelican https://www.planet.com/products/pelican [2a] PWC page https://paperswithcode.com/task/gait-recognition/ https://paperswithcode.com/task/gait-recognition/ [2b] 2 random surveys: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13732 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13732 [3] Paranoia is a bad word because it implies an unjustified or unwarranted mistrust. I think we can all agree that to some degree there is justification. The disagreement is just how much. But I am using the term because it is more prolific and I think the context is appropriate to draw upon the dichotomy in how what was once thought to be tinfoil hat claims become reality: see Snowden. 50 years ago a person that claimed our every move would be tracked -- in the real world and virtual -- would have been called crazy. It was even the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Now we call that a Thursday.
DropInIn 3y ago
Is Switzerland as covered in security cameras as the USA? Because there's not really a whole lot of public places aside from parts of national and state parks where one could reasonably expect to not be on a camera most of the time, right?

hug 3y ago

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to come up with how to eloquently put this in English and I cannot. Maybe English lacks the appropriate terminology to express the difference between privacy and publicity within the expanded scope of current technology. It’s my only language, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it, but I’m absolutely stumped as to how you’d exactly word exactly what you’re not understanding. I feel like it’s a case of the language we speak shaping our interpretation of what is just, and doing so in such a way that it’s hard to even explain what we’re now missing. The problem, in so many words, is that these days the act of being in public is public. That’s a weird sentence to write, and I’m not sure how else to put it. Previously, the memory of any public act was restricted to those who were there to observe it at the time. Any acts in public were by themselves public. Acts in private were private. There was a third quasi-state: anonymous isn’t the right word, because you were always identifiable, but by happenstance you just weren’t. You were in public, but not publicised. Recognisable, but not recognised. Observable, but not observed. By definition though you were always in public, never in private. Modern technology has somewhat erased the third state by slowly but surely eroding the cases in which you are not observed, tracked, recorded, or identified, by some technology or another. It’s made public very public, if you excuse the unavoidable pleonasm. There’s no good word for the third state, that I can think of, and it makes me sad.

frankfrankfrank 3y ago
The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language. Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech? For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course. Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone? These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not. And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy. The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.
- gmane 3y ago
  Wait, why are you drawing the line at the 12th amendment and not the 16th?
- hug 3y ago
  To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”. In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”. Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down? That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down? This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
  - godelski 3y ago
    If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.
Libcat99 3y ago
When you are in a physical space, you can look around you and somewhat reliably observe who can see you, hear you, and observe your actions. You've always then had the choice to base your actions and your speech on who will observe them, with the further knowledge that they might go on to share this with others. The difference isn't that what you do now can be shared. It's the ease of sharing and the fidelity with which it can be shared.
- godelski 3y ago
  I mostly agree, but there's part that you're missing. Ease is a critical issue, but the capacity to record was substantially different back then too, and thus the validity of what was being shared. There's a big difference in someone claiming you said something vs someone having a recording of it. 20 years ago everyone wasn't walking around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. It is not only the ease in sharing and identifying, but even the base capacity to perform the action in the first place. If you were being recorded on video in the past, you'd likely notice the bulky camcorder mounted on some guy's shoulder. (not even mentioning that resolution was very different and depth of field is not a negligible). 20 years ago you did not have a reasonable expectation to be recorded in the public physical space. This is contingent upon the probability of someone being able to perform an action, and even more so without you being aware of said action being performed. That wasn't that long ago...
  - Libcat99 3y ago
    That's what I was getting at with the fidelity attribute. Before you could observe an event and remember it (poorly) and share it (slowly) but technology, for better or worse, has greatly increased the possible fidelity of that memory, which can now shared endlessly without losing quality.
specialist 3y ago
Agreed. I also get flummoxed whenever I try to talk about this stuff. Further, I've only recently appreciated that our modern folk understanding of right to privacy has eclipsed its twin, the right to personal autonomy. The development of the doctrine regarding the tort of "invasion of privacy" was largely spurred by the Warren and Brandeis article, "The Right to Privacy". In it, they explain why they wrote the article in its introduction: "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society". ... They then clarify their goals: "It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States#Brandeis_and_Warren_article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta... Brandeis & Warren were motivated by the evils of "yellow journalism", the social media of its day. "The U.S Constitution safeguards the rights of Americans to privacy and personal autonomy. Although the Constitution does not explicitly provide for such rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution protect these rights, specifically in the areas of marriage, procreation, abortion, private consensual homosexual activity, and medical treatment." https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-rights/ https://www.justia.com/constitutional-law/docs/privacy-right... I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy (h/t @sschueller). Will definitely learn more about their system. My hunch is consent is akin to respecting another's autonomy.
- godelski 3y ago
  > I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the EU laws contingent upon legality? Article 8.2 > Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned __or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.__ Everyone has the right of access to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified. I mean we can take this in good faith, but at the same time Article 20 says everyone is equal in the law but there are several royal families and constitutions that make said families above the law. I love the idea in principle (and far better than nothing) but I personally am not fully trusting. It is, after all, our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.
gspencley 3y ago
The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media. I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past? Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference! For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data! A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!
Pent 3y ago
>the act of being in public is public the act of being in public may be widely distributed

kmlx 3y ago

so it’s illegal to film someone on a street in switzerland and post it online?

wongarsu 3y ago
This is the norm in Europe. Filming a crowd is fine, making a picture of the Eiffel tower with people around it is fine, filming a specific person and publishing it without their consent generally isn't. "Generally" because obviously it gets more interesting in the specifics of when it is ok, but those are exceptions similar to how copyright has exceptions.
- JustBreath 3y ago
  I guess that explains the distinct lack of public freakout videos from Europe.
  - remix2000 3y ago
    I think that's more related to the fact that most Europeans normally speak languages other than English.
    - JustBreath 3y ago
      A bit difficult to post them when they are illegal, no?
      - remix2000 3y ago
        Not at all actually. There is a constant stream of compromising material posted online in Europe. It's a huge problem actually, because it's notoriously hard to get such stuff taken down, as the authorities simply do not care.
- randombits0 3y ago
  “THE TOWER ILLUMINATED Controlled use The various illuminations of the Eiffel Tower (golden illumination, twinkling, beacon and events lighting) are protected. The use of the image of the Eiffel Tower at night is therefore subject to prior authorisation by the SETE. This use is subject to payment of rights, the amount of which is determined by the intended use, the media plan, etc.” https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel-tower https://www.toureiffel.paris/en/business/use-image-of-eiffel...

rlpb 3y ago

I think there's a distinction between being recorded in the first place, and what the recording might be used for in the future. I think it's OK to permit a recording to take place in a public place without explicit consent, but still require consent to use that recording in (for example) publishing it where someone is a feature in that publication (as opposed to someone who happens to be in the background and remains otherwise unidentified). Nowadays technology might mean that someone anonymous gets identified by a third party using automation. So it will become public knowledge, indexable on the person, as to where they were and what they were doing. But that was going to happen anyway. I'm not sure restricting recordings in the first place is really going to stop that.

godelski 3y ago
I think the problem is that the environment has changed and people are applying those changes post hoc to the previous environment and when laws were written. Things have changed a lot and I think we need to act accordingly. Continuing as if it all is the same is like boiling a frog, and it is surprising how fast you can turn up the heat. It may seem drastic, but I have seriously considered messaging dang to nuke this account. Not just delete it, but purge all text as well. A strong divorce from the standards, but that is because [deleted] used to be reasonably sufficient to hide one's identity. We now live in a world where I can reasonably expect to be deanonymized by my words alone and that it is not unlikely that this capacity will be in the hands of the public in the next 5-10 years, along with entire copies of the internet. I do think what we've seen with digging up old tweets will take on a new and pervasive form (likely with even more error). But going back to specifically recording... The truth is that we live in a _very_ different world than when these laws were set up. The idea of reasonable expectation was very different because you wouldn't reasonably expect to walk down the street being recorded since cameras were bulky, expensive, and uncommon. Now every single person has one in their pockets, most businesses are recording you, you're being recorded from airplanes in the sky[0], and not too long from now satellites will (governments already have this capacity but commercial is near there[1]). You didn't have a reasonable expectation for the person standing next to you to be capable of recording your conversation. It was possible for them to wear "a wire" but the likelihood was very low. Likelihood being low is equivalent to "reasonable expectation." The reasonable expectation of not being recorded didn't come from being hidden or out of sight, it came from the fact that the technology either didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Not it is ubiquitous. And despite it seeming so normal, most of this change happened in the last 20 years. But we're getting to the next paradigm shift, which makes all the above even more pervasive. ML/AI. I say this as someone that works in ML/AI and loves the field with a passion (you'll see me discuss it a lot here). But the technology also has downsides (commonly referred to as "malicious AI"). It isn't AGI, it is the ML that already exists. We can identify faces in a crowd and track them across different videos. We can take that 2 pixel person, segment it, and track it (done manually in the radiolab referenced in [0]). We can identify a person by the way that they walk (gait recognition[2]). We can track you by your wifi and bluetooth signal within a building. And so much more. This technology has supercharged the surveillance ecosystem (not somewhere I work in, obviously) and you bet it is being used by countries who don't have the best human rights records (let's not make this a (who's) dick (is the ugliest) measuring contest). Things have changed well beyond what we could have reasonably assumed 20 years ago, even 10. Now, it is not unreasonable to believe that such systems will also perform on the web and that your text is likely identified by you patterns, not just your fingerprint. And this is really it. This stuff is so prolific that we've erased our memory of the past and re-framed this "normal" behavior as applicable to the past and try to justify it. 20 years ago you could walk down the street and reasonably assume that you would not show up on any single camera. Moreso, you could reasonably assume that if you did, you wouldn't show up on many. That that video was unlikely to make it to the internet. And that that video would likely be low grade and unable to identify you. These are all different things, but combined they sum to the expectation that there would not be a record of your movement contingent upon your ability to be identified (same applies to the internet and our chat forums in a similar line of reasoning). __STOP JUSTIFYING "REASONABLE EXPECTATION"__ without recognizing that the ecosystem has rapidly changed and is significantly different from when those laws were written. You are not making a strong argument but rather just reinforcing the surveillance paranoia (as in, people who are paranoid[3] about surveillance will increase said paranoia due to increased relaxation coupled with "nothing to hide" mentality that enables said surveillance). === TLDR === Just because you were in public didn't mean you'd reasonably expect to be recorded. The ecosystem has rapidly changed and we need to recognize this. 10-20 years ago you didn't have a reasonable expectation to be recorded (video or audio) in public as {government,corporate,civilian} recording capabilities were far less. [0] Note that this is 2016 and has only grown since then. If you don't like buzzfeed (I just quick googled) Radiolab has 2 episodes on it ("Eye in the Sky"). https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-the-skies https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/spies-in-t... [1] Planet is getting ready to deploy a 30cm resolution (person = ~2 pixels) constellation called Pelican. It is not real time! But it shouldn't be unreasonable to believe it will be in the future. Current resolutions can already clearly identify cars. https://www.planet.com/products/pelican https://www.planet.com/products/pelican [2a] PWC page https://paperswithcode.com/task/gait-recognition/ https://paperswithcode.com/task/gait-recognition/ [2b] 2 random surveys: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09546 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13732 https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13732 [3] Paranoia is a bad word because it implies an unjustified or unwarranted mistrust. I think we can all agree that to some degree there is justification. The disagreement is just how much. But I am using the term because it is more prolific and I think the context is appropriate to draw upon the dichotomy in how what was once thought to be tinfoil hat claims become reality: see Snowden. 50 years ago a person that claimed our every move would be tracked -- in the real world and virtual -- would have been called crazy. It was even the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Now we call that a Thursday.

DropInIn 3y ago

Is Switzerland as covered in security cameras as the USA? Because there's not really a whole lot of public places aside from parts of national and state parks where one could reasonably expect to not be on a camera most of the time, right?