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I do photography as a hobby, especially street photography and related styles, and I constantly question myself on the ethics of photographing people in public
by hootz 4mo ago
I do photography as a hobby, especially street photography and related styles, and I constantly question myself on the ethics of photographing people in public without permission, even with my huge ass camera. Meanwhile, we have people running spy cameras in their glasses, and they view that as just a normal thing to do. What.
- Jblx2 4mo agoI wonder how many surveillance cameras are currently in operation.
- hootz 4mo agoWhile they are a problem, they are a different problem from spy cameras capturing you up close for the benefit of a single person. Surveillance cameras are for shady governments and maybe "security", camera glasses are for straight up creeps.
- m463 4mo agoThat has already been normalized. This is different. sigh.
- mc32 4mo agoWhen things were on NVRs only some personnel had access to them and they typically rotated fate out every 30 days by default. Importantly they were not interconnected. They were their own silos. Now they are all tied in to central services and people with the right access can pull up anything from any of the devices regardless how irrelevant they are to an investigation. The main problem is the interconnectedness. They are realizing Hayden’s wet dream of total surveillance.
- drdaeman 4mo agoGlasses’ camera [usually] sits right next to couple more cameras embedded in wearer’s skull. [Almost] nobody has any problem with those. That strongly suggests me it’s not the cameras that are problematic, but something about what happens to the images.
- vkou 4mo agoMost people understand that the difference between your camera and your eyes is that one records an image, while the other records a very rough description of an image.
- drdaeman 4mo agoI don’t know how I could’ve made it even more obvious that cameras themselves don’t record anything.
- hootz 4mo agoI guess people wearing spy camera glasses won't do anything at all with the images! /s
- drdaeman 4mo agoMy point is, people point at the camera but have actual issues with some potential capabilities of a system that’s not the camera itself but way downstream of it. Can we please learn to point at correct things? I honestly don’t know what wrong with everyone. It’s like when people have issues with building permits and utility pricing but blame “AI” or “data centers” instead.
- hootz 4mo agoThey are not exactly potential capabilities, but real capabilities already being used by people like obnoxious TikTokers to record them harassing people in public places without the person realizing they are being recorded. If you need to put a camera on glasses for a legitimate reason, such as a device purely for accessibility, then you should be able to get an exception, of course.
- drdaeman 4mo ago“Potential” in a sense wearer’s actions are necessary to cause harm. Or vendor’s, for other risk scenarios. One has to not just have a camera but have that camera recording to a persistent medium and - most importantly - be an asshole to publish that recording inappropriately. That’s a few active steps away from having a camera. > then you should be able to get an exception, of course Of course not. Not when everyone reacts to the cameras themselves instead of TikTok uploads and whatever people are doing. I just want legislation to ban the latter (as the actual harmful thing) and not the former (then maybe allow it on some sort of permit). But I’m sure it’ll be the opposite. Which pisses me off because as a person who has difficulty with faces, for almost my whole adult life I’ve dreamed about a wearable that could make me aware when I see a person I know as I pass by (my brain doesn’t do that on its own). Strictly on-device, zero retention, no transmission, sure - I won’t buy e.g. Meta glasses or whatever until I know I can hack them to do the right thing. But of course there’ll be an argument that others aren’t supposed to know what my devices are doing, so ban them just in case because they make people uncomfortable. We’re literally saying the same thing, pointing that the issue is with something that happens with the images/videos (TikToks)…
- vkou 4mo agoHell, I (like anyone else) grab photos with my phone on vacation, and when I take a picture of a busy market, I do my best to avoid including people in my photographs. People in places I visit are just trying to live their lives, they aren't some kind of human zoo for me.
- hootz 4mo agoYeah, someone giving me even the slightest hint of being uncomfortable already makes me instantly delete their photo. Like, I want to photograph the public without ruining spontaneous moments, but I don't want to make others uncomfortable or mad at me because of my photographs.
- jameson 4mo agoExactly. The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally. Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out. With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".
- drdaeman 4mo agoThat permanence is a bit of a myth. Bit rot is as real as physical one. At least four cloud storages (Bitcasa, hubiC, Ubuntu One, Cyphertite) I’ve used in the past are gone.
- hootz 4mo agoBut it has potential to be permanent through the means of other people storing copies of it. If you send a photo via WhatsApp to someone, for example, that photo is by default saved automatically to their phone, and potentially synced to their Google Photos.
- jameson 4mo agoI want to emphasize "unknowingly" part. Once data is uploaded to an entity, there's no guarantee they'll manage is properly. User agreements change constantly, engineers make mistake, firms get liquidated and data might get sold, and most importantly, as a former employee of social media firms, what the firms say about the user privacy publicly is very different inside.
- basisword 4mo agoAnd we're already seeing a tonne of creepy bastards harassing women using the glasses and they have no recourse because "public place". They should be outright banned imo. I see no benefit to them and I genuinely cannot see the day everyone is running around wearing the same few brands of glasses because they provide that much value. I had to wear regular glasses for a few years and they were a pain in the ass. I'm not doing that voluntarily so I can see live ads and reviews as I walk past restaurants.
- Legend2440 4mo agoYou have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. It is completely legal to film someone on the street. This is important for other reasons, as it is the same law that allows you to film cops.
- dgellow 4mo agoIt's actually country specific, you don't have a universal rule that you can legally record people in public
- fusslo 4mo agolaw != ethics
- whilenot-dev 4mo agoThis seems like a US-centric view, because "it is NOT completely legal to film someone on the street" in the european country I live.