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The rise of the camera launched a fight to protect Gilded Age privacy
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- datameta 2y agoOur relationship with technology is an Escher staircase. Similar thing happening anew with visual genAI.
- tempodox 2y agoThe idea of privacy has been thoroughly frustrated. Today, there's no expectation of privacy any more, let alone “reasonable expectation of privacy”. Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.
- nerdponx 2y agoIt has not yet become unreasonable by definition. Certain powerful forces would like that to be the the case, and they have been successful at moving things in that direction so far, but they haven't succeeded yet.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago*in public You have a reasonable right to privacy, e.g., in your home.
- hanniabu 2y ago*As long as you don't own any internet-connected devices
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y agoHow does that remove the right? Presumably one is making the decision to connect these devices to the internet and could simply decide differently.
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoThere gets to be a certain point where we simply have to accept that while yes, technically one could simply not own a TV (increasingly difficult to find a DumbTV as opposed to a SmartTV with always-on microphone), any IOT things, a smartphone, etc etc, we cannot reasonably expect someone to not do this. Notably the smartphone, which of the entire list of probably the worst offender, second only to the TV perhaps because of the ick/literally-1984 factor of your TV listening to you. We practically can't expect people to do without a smartphone. It's how people pay bills, bank, access weather information, etc. And since it's the most-used path, it's also the best-maintained path. Non-smartphone alternatives have already rotted. Have you tried calling into half of those bills you pay via QR code instead of just scanning the code? Try it sometime. Instead of telling people to just go live on a mountain monastery in Tibet, we could instead simply eat our cake AND have it by just regulating this stuff. Pass privacy laws. Fine people who break them. Samsung, Google, etc will comply rather than not continue to bathe in our ad revenue.
- commodoreboxer 2y agoIt's really not that hard to have a smart TV and simply not connect it to your network. They'll beg to connect, but I haven't seen one that will refuse to function without an internet connection.
- mikestew 2y agoOur brand-new LG OLED doesn’t even beg. It asked at setup time, I selected “not in your marketing drone’s wildest dreams”, it said “cool, bro”, and hasn’t bothered us in the last two weeks. We don’t even see the TV’s home screen. Just power on the Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on and sets inputs.
- adastra22 2y agoFYI they sometimes share a connection via Ethernet-over-HDMI.
- no_time 2y agoThe new WI-FI sensing standard would like to have a word with that. https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/ieee-802-11bf-aims-to-enable-a-new-application-of-wlan-technology-wlan-sensing/ https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/ieee-802-11bf-ai...
- pojntfx 2y ago> Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition. *in the US that is. Basically everywhere else, esp. Europe, has been moving into the complete opposite direction here. There is _more_ privacy rights - and recourse, like the right to delete - then there has been at any point in the past.
- parasense 2y agoYeah, Europe has an interesting way of maintaining legal fictions. The geographical naming rights is one such thing. Anybody anywhere can make any kind of cheese, but one cannot say the cheese is parmesian (or any other given example) cheese without being located in a certain region. There was a famouse case where a cheese maker in itally opened a new factory on the other sside of town which happened to be across the lambardi river, and suddenly they were no longer able to say that cheese was whatever kind of cheese... That is just one example of many... why legal fictions are bad arguments in Europe, and don't work internationally. One cannot demand other people unsee things they have seen (wipe their brain memory), and so it goes it's equally unjust to demand other people delete photos of them they have seen and recorded in photos. It's a lot more nuanced than that, and in some cases the privacy ideas are fully justified, but you get the idea.... there cannot be absolutism in either direction.
- em-bee 2y agojust consider parmesan to be a protected trademark owned by the people living in that area. should they not have the right to protect their trademark?
- Mashimo 2y ago> legal fictions are bad arguments in Europe What does that mean? What is a legal fuction?
- immibis 2y agoThey're disparaging laws they personally don't like by saying they are fictional.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dnissley 2y agoThere is a reasonable expectation of privacy. But we should distinguish between "privacy" with no qualifiers, and "digital privacy" which is a whole other thing. Some people see an equivalence. Others do not.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoWhat's the difference?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dnissley 2y agoOne relates to what people do in their own homes. The other relates to things people do on the internet.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoThe blurring of the line between "in your own home" and "on the Internet" is the crux of the issue. The average person doesn't understand that bringing Internet-connected devices into their home makes some quantity of "behavior in their home" into "behavior on the Internet".
- ryandrake 2y agoApplication developers are deliberately trying to blur the line, too, in their user interface. How many users really grok that when they use iCloud syncing with their photos, they are uploading their photos to the Internet? Since many of us grew up before and then after the Internet, we kind of instinctively get what application functionality needs the Internet, what functionality doesn't, what gets written to the Internet, what gets read from the Internet and so on. Younger computer/phone users don't get this at all. My 11 year old has no mental picture of why X requires Internet and Y doesn't require Internet. She doesn't understand the concept of Data A is stored on-device, and Data B is stored on the Internet. And honestly, I'm even having a harder and harder time explaining it. Tech applications have totally blurred and grayed the previously black-and-white line.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 2y ago> Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition. Hard disagree. The only unreasonable expectation is that you could go out in public and not be seen at all. It is entirely reasonable to expect not to be tracked, doxxed, etc. I would like to put the brakes on the idea that just because we can do something, it is okay to do it. The law was written when computers, networking, smartphones, and high resolution digital cameras did not exist. We could easily conclude that every bit of surveillance technology that did not exist in e.g. 1950 is illegal until explicitly permitted by law. Certain organizations would like to gaslight us into thinking that is impossible, that the cat is out of the bag so to speak. I do not agree. We can do it.
- em-bee 2y agothe opposite is true. as the article shows, according to the law of the time there was no right to privacy, and photos were not protected until the public protested and the laws were changed. likewise today any expectation of privacy is a matter of opinion. just because laws do not sufficiently protect our privacy, does not mean that we should give up any expectation of privacy. on the contrary, we need to demand better protection from out lawmakers. vote accordingly
- nerdponx 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- batch12 2y agoThis seems analogous to how large companies now scrape user-generated content to train their language models for profit.
- unraveller 2y agoThe lack of clear conclusion suggests a new likeness misuse wave is coming though I doubt it. AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means. None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.
- batch12 2y agoThe concern I have is less around using emulating a work and more around not compensating or crediting those whose work has been taken to enrich these companies.
- ghaff 2y agoHow many writers and artists and scientists do you suppose have been "borrowed" from over time?
- batch12 2y agoHow much work has been stolen and exploited by the more powerful for their own gain? Lots I'm sure. Justifying mistakes of the present by normalizing the sins of the past is a weak-willed argument.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 2y agoThe throwaway line in TFA about village life and the section about common law recognizing no right to privacy both highlight my thoughts on this. In prior years we didn't have cameras preserving all our moments in 4K for all time, but as humans we had so little happening in our hamlets/villages, that most of our neighbors knew everything about us and all of our individual actions were never forgotten. Just like how you still remember all the embarrassing things different kids at your high school did (for me, 20+ years later). Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
- mulmen 2y agoI only remember the embarrassing things I did. And because I graduated in the pager era there are very few photographs to remind me of what I have forgotten.
- ghaff 2y agoYeah, the scale of things is different but the idea that everyone in your town (or your social circles) didn't know more or less everything about you is counterfactual.
- rootusrootus 2y agoWe did not need a strict law about privacy when the only way to surveil and preserve information was to use your eyes and brain. And given that everyone tends to be their own main character, even that level of preservation was not terribly effective. The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it before it gets much worse.
- whstl 2y agoMaybe we need to start preserving those things in AI neural nets so they are a bit fuzzy and slightly inaccurate!
- plussed_reader 2y ago
- cxr 2y agoPreviously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859854 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859854> 9 (13) days ago. 46 points. 8-ish comments.
- autoexec 2y agosee also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900087 7 days ago
- belter 2y agoThe pioneer of DeepFakes... "Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” "
- apantel 2y agoSome things you can count on to never change and always be new again.
- Terr_ 2y agoI wonder if anybody's found any ancient sculptures where one kind of bust was swapped onto another, er, another kind of bust. :p Or further back: "Zog, why you paint other head on cave-wall of fertility goddess!?"
- willywanker 2y agoAncient Roman statues were designed so the heads could be detached and switched, for eg when there was a new emperor on the throne.
- pheatherlite 2y agoThat's genuinely creative. I mean the execution, not the act itself. Imagine spending hours in a darkroom to create passable smut and knowing there's a market for that. I guess it's true that any new tech will have one of its first applications dedicated to tickling our monkey brains
- jodrellblank 2y agoThe real non-story in the article is describing the downright awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say the problem is cameras. > "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices" Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it. Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane? You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen. it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen. [1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-end-users-since-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bgoated01 2y ago"...arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures..." Am I the only one who finds the phrase "manually photoshopped" in an article about the late 1800s to early 1900s amusingly anochronistic? How about "manually doctored" or even "altered"?
- nerdponx 2y agoI made the same comment but got flagged for my clumsy phrasing. I got a good laugh out of it. I couldn't tell if it was a subtle joke, or a confused young author + lapse in editing.
- 13of40 2y agoThat one's kind of come full circle, though, since a "photo shop" was a place you could go to get photos printed, altered, etc. since the late 1800s.
- nerdponx 2y agoBut was it ever attested as a one-word verb before Photoshop-the-software existed? That would be a fascinating artifact of "skeumorphic" software naming.
- renewiltord 2y agoShall all amusing text fall at the hands of the machine mind? Is there to be no fun in this universe?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kmoser 2y agoWhile "photoshop" may have entered the current vernacular, it's annoying (maybe even misleading?) in the context of this article because I doubt Comstock used "photoshopped" as a verb. More to the point, we still have verbs like "edited," "retouched," and "altered" that just as accurately describe the process, are more likely to have been used at the time, and are still understood by everybody today (believe it or not, there are people who don't know what Photoshop is, and wouldn't understand it as a verb).
- dfxm12 2y agoDoes Facebook still use your pictures in ads? Article form ~10yr ago: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy
- RyanAdamas 2y agoExclusion through technological adherence.
- rjurney 2y agoI love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity - that point out that the feeling of our age that things are changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.
- jappgar 2y agoIt doesn't dispel the idea that things are changing too quickly. It reinforces that we are engaged in a never ending battle against exploitation and enslavement.
- jrussino 2y agoYeah, I think with all major technological advancements we end up with logistic "S-curve" type growth, with a steep rise followed by an eventual plateau. At the start it can look like exponential growth heading toward a singularity, but that's just not realistic and growth always slows down and levels out eventually. Based on the degree and timescale though the two cases my feel pretty indistinguishable for individuals.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoI think what has changed the most about our relationship with technology now a days compared to prehistory is the overall incentives for technology changing. It used to be technology had to actually improve something to be adopted. A bow and arrow was superior to throwing a stone, so it was adopted on merit. Sowing seed and animal husbandry was superior to migrating around seasonal harvest from uncultivated flora and game, so it was also adopted on merit. No one was marketing this shift. Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
- rjurney 2y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoBoy, this stuff shore do sound familiar... It does give me hope that we'll hammer out some ethical and legal structure, eventually, and, also, that folks will learn to live in the new world.
- EncomLab 2y agoI live in a mid/upper middle class ex-urb that is basically Mayberry - our police Facebook page literally has posts like "Angie your Lab got out again, she's at the station" with a picture of the dog sitting at the chief's desk. A big crime wave is when they randomly flush the high school kids from their yearly "fooling around" camp by the river because they got rowdy and mooned the families kayaking. Yet somehow we now have about 100 flock cameras (and growing) recording every possible way in and out of town and at every subdivision entrance. It's crazy.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoWhat is flock camera? it's personal cameras or from the muni/gov?
- trashcan 2y agoLooks like it is license plate reader cameras. https://www.flocksafety.com/ https://www.flocksafety.com/
- EncomLab 2y agoThey are cameras installed by a private company - Flock Safety - but paid for by uni/gov. In theory they data warehouse the license plate numbers and "vehicle characteristics" of every vehicle that drives by each camera, but no one really knows the extent of the data they collect, how it is secured and stored, or what is required to access and use the information. As far as I can tell they are a favorite of communities that can afford them (which are already low-crime) and are never placed in low-income higher crime areas where they might actually be useful.
- cafard 2y agoI think of a passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: """ The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. """