Also many people just flip out even about the most reasonable of requests.
They would be wrong to, given that it's legal to take photographs or videos in a public place.
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place in the UK.
Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
(Similarly to how "we have license plates on cars to identify them if needed" is a thing and basically nobody complains that I can see your license plate when I walk past your car, but thousands or millions of cameras recording all traffic and logging plates are something people are concerned about, even if its completely legal in some places)
What was that Larry Ellison quote that came up again over the weekend?
- I see who sees me, a digital copy breaks this symmetry
- Recordings may be stored indefinitely, searched through, used for things I can't even imagine today
- in a local environment a specific behavior might be normal or accepted while in some other cultures it is not. This is conflict bound to happen
etc.
I accept I am visible in public to all who share a space but I do not accept that the ephemeral nature of my existence in that space should be violated.
I've noticed that folks born after some point in the early 2000's tend to feel this way, and they don't even realize that the survellience in 1984 was meant to be problematic, or why it might feel that way to others
It seems that the panopticon has been normalized successfully.
What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.
Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with
Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
"Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun."
I was wondering if there are no biodegradable bullets for Airsoft and found out that they exist. Maybe a better solution than plastic in the woods.
We have lived in our house for +15 years and we still regularly find small fluorescent yellow ball bearings in the garden soil from the previous owners family. These things are here to stay
https://www.filamentive.com/the-truth-about-the-biodegradabi...
> PLA is only biodegradable under industrial composting conditions and anaerobic digestion – there is no evidence of PLA being biodegradable in soil, home compost or landfill environment.
We’re not that far off in Europe. Give it a couple of years more and climate change will make sure we get there.
https://jakubmarian.com/highest-recorded-temperature-by-coun...
There are plenty of posts of people putting 3d prints in compost piles, for months or years, and visually not much happens. Even stuff advertiser as bio don't fare that well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tavrkWrazWI
I’m sure they’re better now, but I have no idea!
Edit: forgot to say. In every field I’ve been too, there’s millions of leftover BBs, and I’ve never seen one with signs of degradation.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.
I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).
Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.
There are a lot of '1A' auditors on youtube. They can be nasally and annoying but it's hilarious how often people go into a rage that they're being filmed despite the fact the people getting angry are doing the same to everyone else.
This doesn't necessarily need to be an article, because the author could have just handled it with each venue individually, but this just gets the conversation going about general sentiment and wider applicability.
My guess is that early on this kind of youtuber was relatively rare and so being captured occasionally wasn't a big deal, but that now the trend is catching on, a it's happening regularly and becoming a concern for some people.
I guess they can weigh that against their customers desire for privacy.
With the OP example, people getting recorded are not bystanders catching stray camera focus, they are the subject of the video. Without other participants, there would be little 'content'. Imagine going to an indoor climbing venue, recording someone else, and publishing just that.
Stop taking video in public, or at least of the public. You just assume you should be able to do that and the whole world should adjust to your preference. Maybe it should be the other way around.
Ask your teammates not to take videos, or find a different group or a different hobby. But since they genuinely enjoy posting the videos, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're probably the one who's going to have move on.
You're entitled to not want videos of you taken in public places showing up online. But you're not entitled to getting that outcome.
This discussion isn't about what's polite.
It's about what you think ought to be against the law. And being fined or thrown in jail if you break the law.
Is that what you want? For innocent photography in public to be essentially outlawed?
And if you might need to make the photo public, you could blur the faces.
That's not a world I would want to live in, and I guess I'm thankful most other people don't either.
The ability to photograph is important for accountability and truth in a democracy, it's important to families wanting to document and share their trips easily, and it's important for art, among many other things. Fundamentally, it feels like a kind of freedom to me.
But it's interesting to see there are people who disagree.
What if you're in the photo? What if you're doing something newsworthy? Or what if you're right behind the person doing something newsworthy?
Blur that region before posting it with an algorithm that can't be reversed. The camera app could even do this automatically.
> What if you're doing something newsworthy?
Every good rule has some exceptions.
If they want to do it voluntarily then great. But making it criminal if you don't -- I don't understand that.
You’re just making an argument for inconveniencing others out of laziness — but trying to dress it up in principles.
None of those things require you to invade their privacy and enjoyment of public space — you’re just negatively impacting them because you’re lazy and antisocial.
Fines are how we handle such nuisances in other cases.
And fines aren't some kind of innocent thing. If you don't pay the fines, the police come to seize your property. If you resist, you go to jail. That's what you want?
Again, that's just not the world I want to live in.
Yes. I would like to go back to a time before everyone had 3 different cameras with them and the ability to share those photos to a global network so third parties can use that data to track what I am doing literally everywhere.
I no longer leave my house except for strictly necessary obligations.
What is making that the best cost-benefit analysis for you?
I don't think it's unreasonable to have a level-headed discussion about how society and technology have evolved since those norms came into practice, and if they should be expanded now that photography is ubiquitous.
You might have that wrong. It's when that space involves people wearing revealing clothing. And Airsoft kit is... not that.
It's not about exercise.
To that extent, the hobbyists who like to create content for the internet should be asking for consent since their footage, and arguably their clout, depends on the participation of everybody else in the group. Otherwise they're just traipsing around a private plot of land all kitted up but with nobody to shoot. If they're monetising that content then they are profiting from the OP's likeness.
This is not far removed from the (fully understandable) blowback on influencers recording themselves (and often other people for rage-induced clout) inside gyms. These are also not public places.
And they may very well have decided that more customers want to take and share videos, than there are customers who are bothered by it.
And nobody is talking about monetizing content here. There's no profit. If there were, that would be a different conversation obviously. But the post did not bring that up.
At the moment, these things are not the problem of the person taking the video
Yes! Another EU regulation will solve this right quick.
How would you solve the problem in large scale, low effort way?
Doesn't seem too big ask to edit out anyone who has not opted-in. Especially in age of AI that should make it trivial.
This is not clear at all to me.
When you go into public you’re accepting that you might be filmed. The reality is that you are being filmed constantly. It’s just that it bothers you sometimes.
It reminds me of The Light of Other Days (a book about a society where technology makes any privacy impossible). Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
The good news about this is that hardly any normal person would ever watch these Airsoft videos for more than 5 or 10 seconds.
Perhaps this article being #1 on HN right now is evidence that your perspective is not the same as "nearly everybody" else
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
We had this idea that privacy violation is like pollution. But now it's like how our generation is used to plastic in the ocean and never seeing all the stars. It's just life.
Both my kids (and me) found it very off-putting, so there's some anecdata that at least some young kids still feel it's an invasion of privacy.
Maybe not all is lost.
The same guy did similar when his mom was on her death bed. Jesus Christ.
The age of posting on Facebook under your real name with privacy settings public is long gone because of the numerous obvious risks.
But just being seen in a small segment of a YouTube video with no name is a pretty minor risk.
It might become a slightly larger risk when image processing and face recognition get cheap enough that anyone can search to find every video/livestream/photo containing your face.
I’d much rather be shown on YouTube playing a sport.
Yeah? Who said that? Any selfish person can say the same about anything. "Yeah my dog shat your lawn but that's just part of life. Deal with it". What's part of life is different for everyone.
>I get annoyed when people smoke in public or pointlessly honk horns at night.
Yeah that's annoying, but neither the smoke or the honk are records of your private life published without consent on the internet, forever. So apples and oranges.
There’s nothing stopping us from saying this sucks, it’s socially toxic, and we’re not going to put up with it anymore.
Solution here is to use a private airsoft field then make no filming a condition of entry. If they violate the rule, trespass.
These kids have been on camera since they were in the womb. The delivery had a pro videographer. Parents had baby monitors with a video feed, later a nanny cam. Schools had cameras in the classrooms and busses from before first grade. Higher grades onwards all their peers had smartphones and social media accounts.
Some middle aged dude who doesn't want to be on video makes no sense to them, like that weird uncle of yours who in 2010 had no phone or email address.
And there's such a focus on the law and expectation of privacy in public places in these comments. There's a huge difference between someone complaining about being recorded in a small hobby community and complaining about being filmed on a public street.
The response ranged from “you can ask but you can’t prevent people from posting” to “it’d be rude and inconsiderate to even ask”. One person even argued that it would be rude and other people would judge them if they went to a wedding and didn’t have a picture of the bride and groom.
I don’t think I ever felt the generational divide as acutely as in reading those responses, and I’m not even that old, I had social media when I was in high school.
I’d argue photos can be more invasive. If someone makes a 10 minute video and you’re somewhere in the background for 5 seconds, no one may ever notice. Furthermore, with compression artefacts for motion you may become difficult to recognise.
But if you’re in a photo, people will be looking at it for longer and are thus most likely to notice you and possibly zoom in on you with all the quality the static sensor provides.
Furthermore, photographs have greater potential to create false narratives. A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.
There were plenty of TV shows centred around candid camera / security camera / home video footage back in the 1980s/1990s well before digital cameras or the internet was ubiquitous.
Is there still in those case no expectation of privacy? Where exactly is the line? Maybe changing rooms and toilets are not public places anymore... But is the line really that clear?
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
In the US the legal doctrine is no privacy at all in public spaces (a lot more expansive than that actually), that's probably where those comments come from.
Regardless of that, some strangers think it's fine to take pictures of them in public... sometimes they ask first, sometimes they don't.
Edit: I don’t think k posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public, but rather anything the general public has access to.
In this case, you have a gun. Surely you can find a way to ruin this guy's day. He won't have much interesting footage if the other team agrees to end his shit as soon as the game starts like you would the flashy winger with fluorescent boots trying rainbow flicks.
So while the author makes an interesting point about surveillance I can’t tell if he’s being ironic on purpose.
You might have some recourse if another person’s video singles you out, but just being one of the several people in an airsoft video, where your face is partially obscured anyway, isn’t much of a legal standing.
That's the correct answer. End of the story.
It is our consensus of what "public space" means and one can do with it (which varies depending on where you are) that forms a lot of our social norms and society. It is why hang drying clothes is acceptable/normal in many parts of the world but not in the US. It is why people are expected to wear at least some clothes. It is why you can take photos of random people, including kids, without their/their parents' consent in the US in public space.
If you think you are so special to never show up in a photo, don't be in the public in the first, or wear a mask, a hat plus sunglasses or something else. Celebrities have been doing this for forever.
I must be living in a parallel universe of airsoft players. I can't possibly imagine anyone in that space changing their ways because somebody kindly asked them to
And this is a sensitive topic here. Some people here get upset if you point a camera at them and will aggressively demand that you delete their photo. I've seen that happen a few times (not to me). Some people really get pissed off over this here and they tend to known their rights. So good luck arguing otherwise.
If you look at the rules here, they are quite sensible. You can't just publish photos or videos with recognizable people in them unless it's clearly a public event (like a demonstration, concert, etc.). Taking the photos is mostly OK (up to a point). And there's an exemption for private photos. But you can't just publish photos with people recognizably in them unless falls under the narrow set of exceptions to that rule.
Photos of people actually count as personally identifiable information under GDPR. So, people can object to that being stored by companies, ask for it to be removed, and companies need valid reasons for storing such photos.
In this case, the person is in the UK where people simply have less protections against this. Which is something the tabloid press there tends to abuse by trying to get photos of famous people in private / embarrassing situations by all means possible. That would be a lot less legal in Germany and expose you to lawsuits if you were to do that. The German tabloid press has a rich history of that happening.
I'd imagine if 17 year olds were allowed you could make it legally dicy enough for someone that they'd not want to do it, if they were profiting off of it.
Wikimedia has some examples, but I'm sure it is not comprehensive: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...
I lament that this guy may have to wear a mask, And I wish more venues had no photography or video. The last thing I wanted to go to the gym and working out, and I accidentally glance over at someone, who videotaped it, and then put me on the internet with some caption..
UK law already strikes the right balance: you’re free to record in public or semi-public spaces unless there’s a specific ban, while also having protections against harassment or misuse. That’s a sensible framework we should never dilute with “consent-by-default” rules, which would only stifle creativity and community sharing. If you join a hobby where cameras are standard, it’s fair to expect that presence, not to restrict others’ enjoyment because of hypothetical discomfort.
If you don’t like that, nothing stops you from setting up your own private games with different rules
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”. > > This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
I don't like it that things are recorded around the clock or by anyone and be broadcast anywhere, but the ship on this has sailed long ago.
> In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby). > > But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conferences, with people saying “Of course I’m free to take photos of identifiable individuals without their consent and publish them online”.
Again is there an expectation of privacy? Are people told that they are not allowed to use their cameras?
It is whether the is a expectation of privacy. A McDonald's or a Burger King is "private property", but there is no expectation of privacy. I would not expect privacy at an airsoft, paint-balling or any other outdoor activity even if it is on private property.
A public toilet cubical is a public place with an expectation of privacy.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
It depends whether there was an expectation of privacy as whether it should feel wrong. If there isn't an expectation of privacy. Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
> This isn’t about what is legal (although, in some cases, claims of legality may be poorly conceived), but around my own perceptions of a private life, and a dislike for the fact that, just because one can publish such things, that one should.
How else is this supposed to be tacked if not by what is legally permissible?
Unfortunately for all of us, if public-by-default becomes the norm, then this is gonna lead to even more social cooling, more conformism and less freedom.
Is he afraid that someone will be able to identify him as engaging in a hobby that some people might be judgmental about, e.g. a potential employer finding the footage and concluding “this guy spends lots of time and money playing a children’s game; he’s clearly not a serious person.” That I can understand.
But it seems like his position is stronger than this:
>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
So essentially, it’s wrong to publish any photo that happens to include people in the background? If I take an artistic photo at an art museum [0] or a restaurant [1] or a streetscape [2] and there happen to be people in the background, what possible harm could come to the people incidentally captured?
[0] https://500px.com/search?q=the%20Met&type=photos&sort=releva...
[1] https://500px.com/search?q=Busy%20restaurant&type=photos&sor...
[2] https://500px.com/search?q=Times%20Square%20&type=photos&sor...
Maybe publicizing where someone is every week lets criminals plan their crimes. Maybe it gives away someone's location to an abusive ex or family member or stalker. Maybe people just don't want Google and the like to have even more data about our whereabouts and actions and identity.
Even if it were a gray area, the serious penalties would probably be enough to make someone want to blur it out.
It is legal (in most places) to film people in public but it is not necessarily legal to post the video to social media.
The Irish Data Protection Commission says:
> There is nothing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that prohibits people from taking photos in a public place. Provided you are not harassing anyone, taking photographs of people in public is generally allowed and most likely will qualify for the household exemption under Article 2(2)(c) of the GDPR.
> However, what you do with that photo can potentially become a data protection issue, for example, if the photograph, which contained the personal data of individuals, was sold for commercial gain or was posted publicly on a social media account. Under those circumstances, you are likely to be considered a data controller which brings with it a host of obligations and duties under data protection law. In particular, it would be necessary for you to demonstrate, amongst other things, your lawful basis for the processing of such personal data under Article 6(1) of the GDPR.
maxehmookau•1h ago
Sometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.
I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
BolexNOLA•1h ago
My first experience akin to this happened when I was at the grocery store during Covid. This guy stood near the checkout lines and just did a big arc with his phone filming all of us and mocking masks. Like the author of the blog sometimes I’m just like “it’s not worth it” but I had one of my kids with me and when I asked the guy to stop, he started ranting at me about how he uses an app that blurs faces, it’s a free country, etc. I just moved on but it’s like… dude, we’re all just trying to get through the day out here and I’m with my kid at the grocery store. Do I really need to be putting up with this crap?
I imagine if people actually start wearing any of these smart glasses in any appreciable number these experiences will be sadly pretty typical.
maxehmookau•1h ago
But I'm also free to apply societal pressure to behave like a grown-up.
mapontosevenths•50m ago
I think this is the key.
It might be legal, but it's not polite. It's a bit like blasting crappy music from your phone on the bus without headphones. Grown ups should know better.
maxehmookau•47m ago
Too many folks forget this.
Do what you want, but I'll tell you if I don't like it. Others might too.
They're not infringing on your rights, but it might make you a little uncomfortable.
BolexNOLA•19m ago
If I were to compare it to a client relationship, it’s the kind of person who throws the contract in a partner’s/client’s/vendor’s face anytime there is a minor disagreement or discussion about details. Reasonable people know you only start pointing to the contract when things escalate to a certain point as it locks everybody into a defensive posture and now everybody is going to be rigid moving forward.