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.
Also not sure why you assumed there was any situation to be "defused". Weird. I guess you may be the type I referred to in my last paragraph
If you know you're just going to remain in disagreement, then hell yes. It's not worth the conflict. Now, if they could point to a law I was breaking, then maybe I'd entertain them for a minute, but this is not that.
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 or write it down if needed, 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?
EDIT: or to bring a specific real-world example: A friend of mine does classes at a local studio that also offers martial arts courses, and some of the local right-wing bubble has gotten it in their head that this has to be "antifa combat training" and keeps screaming that this needs to be monitored. The current local government has been ignoring them, but a lot of people are probably quite happy now that there isn't an easy-to-get public record of who was there and "needs a visit" just because some influencer needed to film her dance lessons.
Even if you're right, and we all just should be comfortable with being seen by the internet when we're in any semi-public space, you can't expect human brains and culture to change on a dime, and you should expect weird effects.
Side note, this is a spectrum, not like a black and white thing. Semi-public is a thing, why not let it still be a thing
- 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 conflict is bound to happen
etc.
So why worry about it? It's like worrying a camera will "capture your soul" or whatever the story about those tribesmen is.
> a local environment a specific behavior might be normal or accepted while in some other cultures it is not
Do you actually have an example of this or is this yet another hypothetical?
Some political view in Region A is wildly unaccepted in Region B, thus making them "enemies". See recent conflicts globally.
I know who the whackjobs are and don't need to interact with them or watch my speech to avoid triggering them and dealing with ensuing harassment, threats, violence.
But of course, that ship has sailed in much of the world, with the ubiquity of surveillance and the dearth of opposition.
Also, you have correctly noted that I did not say that second thing (since nobody has asked me to).
Good job, 2/2 accuracy, would chat again.
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
The idea that you can coat much more resilient stuff in PFAS and label it “biodegradable” is at least as big a scam as California’s $0.10 “reusable” bags, or mixed stream recycling.
I’m for taking each use of plastic, by global volume, and then banning them, in order.
We should probably start with fishing nets.
Alternatively, the industry should need to produce 200% as much post-consumer recycled plastic made from the same grade as they’re manufacturing. This would act as a tax, strongly encouraging investment in more sustainable materials. Maybe drop that to 150% if the plastic in the product is 100% recycled.
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.
That's a bit over the top. It's a game, like paintball, Nerf, or Mortal Kombat. Has nothing to do with actual murder.
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.
Many hobbies are like this. The majority of footage people record on their GoPros is for themself. It's rare for someone to edit it into a YouTube video. Even more rare for someone to go see it.
The AirSoft example is interesting because players where so much protective gear and face masks that it would be very difficult to recognize anyone's likeness anyway.
Don't go to places that allow recording.
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.
In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby).
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.
I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes
You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.
We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?
Ephemeral public has no expectation of ephemeral privacy, but me walking down a street with a handful of people on it should not lead me to expect that being recorded and having it broadcast to the entire human race, permanently, for eternity.
You shouldn't have an expectation either way. If anything, the expectation that you will not be recorded is more of a violation of the social contract that the reverse. It's a public space that can be used for many purposes. If the effect on bystanders is minimal then attempting to exclude an activity is wrong. Can we say "I don't want you to see me, so look away whenever I am out." "I don't want to wait in traffic so everyone else has to pull over and clear the road when I am driving." "I didn't consent to this smell, so this restaurant has to turn off their stoves and ovens hours before I will be coming by."
Reality is that you can't exclude others if they aren't doing something that excludes you.
I hear you and I agree public spaces involve us working and coexisting together, not tailoring the public space to what one person wants.
On the other hand, there is something in me that doesn't like for-profit rage bait creators monetizing how I react to a guy shoving a camera in my face and doing something irregular. I feel like it is a type of assault we don't have a name for yet but that should conceivably be criminal.
I just realize that I'm acting like the those that first saw the printed word or a camera and felt uneasy about it, I am just an old man angry that video cameras and globalization of content exists. I'm probably just a luddite trying to stop the world from progressing.
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.
However, there are significant differences: 1. The camera is in a fixed position, 2. The footage is not typically shared let alone published online.
I'm not sure I support anything. I'm just pointing out that there is a path available if you don't just assume that you should be allowed to take video.
But it wouldn't bother me at all to have, say, a rule that you couldn't have a surveillance camera covering any space you didn't own, and furthermore that if you had a camera covering a space that you did own that was open to the public, and recordings would be deleted after say 24 hours unless there was special justification to keep a specific one.
I would have thought they would be very useful for adjudicating high cost events such as automobile collisions, or even police interactions.
Just as the author says: “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 doesn’t fall to the legal level, but a social rules level.
People who obnoxiously recording people in public, even if 100% legal, and disregard the wishes and conform of others around them deserve social consequences.
Some things should only exist at the social norms level. IMO it would be hunky dory if societies considered what “privacy in public” looks like in the modern age, and came to the conclusions like “no dragnets pls”.
You've got a very large, diverse population without a strong social identity and ever-fraying trust. So you won't consistently get basic human decency any longer. That's something which is extended to the in-group with which you have real social ties and obligations. Most people don't have this any longer.
Human decency still exists as it has always done. But perhaps not in a form that we all agree on.
This is nonsense. People started taking photos of crowds almost as soon as the camera was invented.
If this existed we'd have a lot less problems in this world.
Life would be absolutely impossible without it
The debate is about its extent
For a forum that tends to trend libertarian, I'm genuinely surprised by the level of enthusiasm for using the government to police the photos people take and share of people in public spaces.
Seriously? This one? This place is Reddit with more words, in my ever-degrading experience.
While I think we all agree that this is crucially important, for many of us the affront to decency is not the capture of photons that have previously bounced off someone's skin, but the very idea that that person has a claim to those photons in perpetuity.
I think it's indecent to suggest that someone needs to avert their gaze (or in this case, their CMOS sensor) because I happen to be in the area.
If the same thing happens in 2025, there's a decent chance your unmentionables will end up posted online for anyone to ogle in perpetuity. If you find out about it, it could really eat at you.
I don't have a solution to it, or even know if there should be one. But I think it's undeniable that it's causing a fundamental shift in what "private" and "public" mean, in people's minds if not legally. We used to be more private in public than we are now.
If people aren't decent enough to wait till you are dead and bother you over the footage of you they've seen, you should go after them, not the person who recorded the footage. They are the ones who cause you inconvenience.
...I think this advances the point GP makes. We have allowed obsession over body image to take on religious proportions (falling off both ends of the spectrum, toward tiktok swimsuit edition on one end, and the burka on the other).
Part of this obsession is the claim of ownership of every photon that bounces off one's skin until it is eventually captured by someone else's eye (biological or electronic).
A healthy internet age is one in which we find comfort in our bodies, fitness in our habits, and security without needing to control every depiction of us.
This isnt rocket science guys, why are we all acting stupid.
Even the richest man on earth's (one of them) solution to related problems is a tall hedge around his property that he gets fined for. There ain't no going back.
Again, let's stop playing stupid. And, while we're at it, let's stop suggesting "solutions" that we know we can't implement.
There's a very simple solution we can do right now: don't take naked pictures of people.
Sure. Also sexism, puritanism, security through obscurity and abrahamic religions while you are at it. It's long overdue.
> There's a very simple solution we can do right now: don't take naked pictures of people.
That's a very temporary solution since in a very near future everybody will have their pictures taken all the time and not necessarily in the wavelengths that stop at clothing for one simple reason, technology exists.
Don't worry, you don't really have to fix anything. Just peacefully die and let the next generation grow up without your cultural burden. It's also a temporary solution but feasible for now since death is still a thing people do.
What? No.
You can't hand wave away absolutionism. You can't just say "well thing X will definitely happen!"
That's not an argument, that's a belief. You've just told me your religion. Not an argument.
There's absolutely zero fucking reason why we need cameras everywhere taking naked pictures of people. That isn't just inevitable - you literally just made that up.
This "slow March towards tech gods" thing I see pisses me off beyond belief.
Because people act like it's an argument or a style of logic. No. Its a religion. You're a scientologist. You don't need me, or hackernews, you need a fucking therapist.
I mean, do you even hear yourself? You're saying we should be allowed to take as many pictures of nude women and girls as we want because you believe, some day, some Angelic tech will appear that will be omnipotent.
Dude, you sound insane. Like legitimately insane.
Also, the whole "well technology exists!!1" mindset is just so obviously fucking wrong and stupid.
You know what other technology exists right now? Today? Guns.
Does that mean I can shoot you in the face? Well the technology exists! Making murder illegal is a temporary solution! The real solution is teleporting to an alternate reality where evil does not exist!
Come on.
I never said anything even remotely similar. All I'm saying is that when it happens (and it will) we should prioritize ensuring that it's not a reason for anyone to self-harm.
> You know what other technology exists right now? Today? Guns. > Does that mean I can shoot you in the face? Well the technology exists!
Yes, you can. Regardless of any laws. And I take precautions to avoid that scenario with a technological solution that lets me discuss with you without ever letting you know where my face is. Few hundred years ago it would be a power of a techno-god. Today it's everyday's baseline.
Why is it inevitable? I reject that conclusion. Inevitability isn't an argument, it's a belief system.
I can say anything is inevitable. Shooting someone in the face is inevitable if guns exist. Okay, sure.
But shooting someone in the face is still illegal, no matter how inevitable it is. The solution isn't to make people good - because that's not reasonable.
I'm frustrated because this argument is so intrinsically and fundamentally flawed, and in such an obvious way, but I still have to argue against it.
I feel like I'm arguing that the sky is blue. Is this for real?
Uhhh, yeah. Instead of crippling society by suggesting we remove our eyeballs or brains (or their electronic equivalents), let's fix the actual problems.
Your use of the "playing stupid" cudgel is not helpful. Instead of accusing others of playing dumb, let's hear: how do _you_ see an internet age free of patriarchal and sexist structures emerging?
Its not meant to be helpful, it's meant to be true. Sorry about it.
> Uhhh, yeah. Instead of crippling society by suggesting we remove our eyeballs or brains (or their electronic equivalents), let's fix the actual problems.
Ahh see here's the underlying problem: you have a religious belief that you're quickly trying to pass off as an argument!
You cannot, under any circumstances, just compare humans to computers for free.
Humans have special rights, and have always had special rights, forever. You cannot just undo millions of years of understanding and expect me to go along with it.
A camera DOES NOT HAVE RIGHTS. A camera is not an eyeball. And LLM is not a brain. And so on and so on.
Some LLM singularly type folk, call them tech Christians, hold the belief that technology will soon supercede humanity and therefore LLMs are equivalent to Brains.
But that is a belief. Let me repeat that. That is a belief. That is not argument.
Right now, computer programs do not have rights. Its not an if, not a but, not a maybe - they don't have rights.
We're allowed to do this because we are human. We give ourselves special privileges.
That's why if I eat a good steak then that's just a nice dinner. But if I chop you up and eat you, I'm going to prison.
We haven't even given fucking cows rights yet. And they're literally alive and conscious. We can't just give cameras or programs rights. Come on man.
> Instead of accusing others of playing dumb, let's hear: how do _you_ see an internet age free of patriarchal and sexist structures emerging?
Slowly, over time, and predominantly not by objectifying women by proposing we should be allowed to take naked pictures of them whenever we want. Duh.
/thread
I don't think your situations are the same as someone appearing on some youtube channel without their consent every single week unless they opt out of participating at all.
Any user uploading to a video platform has to run their video through this integration user-facial detection layer at some point in their editing pipeline. Payments are made accordingly.
Just brainstorming.
Yes, this is what the author is concerned about. There’s a big difference between being filmed incidentally, and being filmed on purpose for the activity you’re engaged in. Being accidentally in the background is one thing, while being the subject of a video and having the camera aimed at you is another. Even though public photography is also legal where I live, and I believe we should keep that right, if I filmed close-ups of people in the car park getting in and out of their cars, I’d expect most people would object and find it uncomfortable.
Not every thing has to be recorded.
It is like all those runners and cyclists who log and share all their runs/rides on Strava without even taking the time to figure out if it really serves a purpose other than a vain attention seeking.
https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...
Honestly, the older I get the more I cherish that I grew up in a time before the compulsion to post literally everything.
Why are you shaming people for seeking what they obviously lack and need for their psychological well being?
If you are doing it because you're a creator on YouTube and you are getting paid through views on YouTube, aren't you then required to get release info? If it's for personal use, sure thing, but when you are making money on it then you should absolutely get releases and default to bluring non-released individuals.
I think the bigger issue is that our laws (in the US at least) haven't really caught up with this gig/creator economy. It would be no different than a blockbuster film group filming a war/battle sequence and having to get permission ahead of time from the location and individuals.
My work will have signs up or ask explicitly if they are filming and intend to publish. If you go to a private org with the intention of filming, you should follow the same rules for a full-budget production group.
The model release laws are usually tied to commercial use where some endorsement is implied.
That’s why your company must secure a model release when filming in your office: The material is being used in a manner related to the company and as an employee in the video you are implicitly part of that.
If the AirSoft facility was filming customers and using that footage in an ad, they would probably require model release forms.
There are freedom of speech protections covering the capture of likeness for artistic display, editorial use, and so on.
If the YouTuber made some video in this case as an ad for some AirSoft product and included other people in it without model release forms in a way that implied they were part of the endorsement, they could be in trouble. If they’re just making videos reporting on their games then I doubt there’s an argument that you could make requiring a model release, even if the channel was monetized.
This is also why news channels don't need to secure model release forms when reporting on public events. If we required everyone to do the model release form thing to show any video of them, you would never see any negative videos of politicians or criminals agin.
I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.
I can understand some people preferring not to be filmed in public or shared commercial spaces, but ultimately if you are truly in public then being photographed or recorded is just part of the deal.
I don’t think some people have thought about the second-order effects of things like requiring model release forms for everyone who enters the frame. Imagine getting a ticket or being sued by your busybody neighbor because you took a video of your kids in the backyard and they walked past. Laws like this are frequently abused by people who want to wield power over others, not simply people who simply want to protect themselves.
When you extend the thinking to topics like news reporting and journalism it becomes obvious why you don't want laws requiring everyone to give consent to have video shared of themselves in public: No politician would ever allow footage of themselves to be shared unless it's picture perfect and in line with what they want you to see.
It's also legal to play an annoying song on repeat all day on a quiet hiking trail, but people (rightfully) recognize that as improper socially.
My very very strong gut feeling is that this is an influx of bots muddying the waters of discussion in concert with the unleashing of the secret police force that is ICE.
It seems to me that every real person sees the crucial importance of public photography in peacefully maintaining accountability.
If you believe in the basic right of general purpose computing - not just a political right, but the idea that general purpose computing is the lifeblood of the internet age - then it seems to follow logically that the capture of photons and depiction thereof are part of the functioning the commons.
Restrictions (especially with the force of law, but also social pressures) of the basic and deeply human capacity to capture photons and vibrations, and to make depictions of the results of that capture, are invariably used by the more powerful against the less powerful. eg: cops playing "copyrighted" material to prevent posting to youtube.
Much safer and fairer is to just give ourselves the same rights we might imagine are afforded to an alien, 4 light years away, looking through an extremely powerful telescope. Do you suggest that earth laws extend to this alien? Is she prohibited from posting the activities she can see of ours through her telescope?
1. Taking pictures/videos for personal use.
2. Taking pictures/videos for internet fame/money.
3. Taking pictures/videos as a check on abuse of power.
Most opposition now is due to #2, sometimes under the guise of #3; #3 also has divisions between "is it {illegal,unethical,immoral,weird}?"
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20040611150802/http://villagevoi...
I don't know about that. Aroudn this time was the peak of "Glassholes" for those who remember that phenomenon. People really didn't want someone to be potentially, passively recording their conversation. Would that not be a thing should Google re-launch Google Glass today? That might be a real factor given how Meta is trying to push AR glasses.
Just like some gyms are accommodating to people filming TikTok’s and some aren’t, an airsoft range could have camera or no camera days, if that was something their players wanted.
or expressly allowed, so that this dude knows not to go there
Either that or, if you can’t get a model release, make sure to blur their face in editing. This used to be standard practice.
This seems reasonable to me. If its airsoft, how many people are involved? 10? 20? Just go around and ask people if they will allow you to post video of the game with them in it.
I'm fine with being recorded as long as you keep it private. Not with that video ending up on your Drive backups or OneDrive etc, let alone YT.
"Sharing with a third party" because you have phone backups enabled is very different from streaming live or uploading to social media, like most are actually discussing here.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
The offline alternative exists even if your OS employs dark UX patterns to make that frustrating. GP is the one who is conflating things.
Tangentially, nightclubs put stickers over your phone cameras and that is a great idea.
Think of it like a public pool. It is unreasonable to say that there should be public pools that children aren't allowed into, but it's also unreasonable to expect all adults to want to swim with children. This is why we have the concept of adult swim time.
In fully public spaces I think we're pretty much out of luck, though I do think that laser/lidar-based countermeasures should be legal.
E.g. you can film public spaces as much as you want, but be careful of what you post to YouTube.
i think i would prefer this. i'd rather live in the world where no one can record or photograph you in public than the world where you're streamed or entombed in a vod for life.
So, why not get a release? Why not perform some light video editing to cut/blur out people who don't want to be there? These are not high bars to clear. I've done similar things, you have every opportunity to talk to the group and sort this out, and explain why you're filming and where you're publishing. Then people can come to an informed decision...
> 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.
Heh. As a photog I've have plenty of similar run ins with people...but only when wielding an SLR (or similar). Was once standing on a sidewalk, saw a building that looked cool, took a picture. I'm more into architecture than people. Security comes out from the lobby to accost me. I very politely told them "Dude, I'm on the sidewalk, you can't do shit"
I also had the local transit agency threaten to call the cops on me for taking photos. Literally of just the platform and rails (without people) when I was trying to document the system for Wikipedia. Even though on their website it EXPLICITLY states that what I was doing was within their rules. Ignoring the fact that it was totally legal regardless.
That time I just (metaphorically) ran away rather than dealing with a belligerent station agent. Was what I was doing wrong? No. Was it legal? Yes. But did I want to deal with the transit police? Nope.
The thing that drives me batshit nuts is no one seems to care if you're taking a picture with a phone. The latest iPhone have megapixel counts in excess of many DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I can be way more sneaky with my phone. By using a DSLR type camera I'm being very public that "Hey, I'm taking a picture here" that should assure people, rather than scare them.
If AI photo/video generation continues to improve then it shouldn't be a problem as the photo/video taking culture will most likely die off once people assume any photos/videos they see are generated.
Don't publish the videos unless you have a good reason to. There is no upside to just throwing everything you record on the internet. People don't watch the videos, your channel is degraded by having tons of garbage on it, and people in the videos don't want to be online like that.
If you stop pretending that a random video is somehow going to 'go viral' or make you famous, the entire problem just evaporates.
If you want to publish videos put the effort into making good ones that people will actually watch, which means raising the bar by (in part) finding people who want to be in them. Videos of random people doing pretty mundane things like their hobbies won't turn you into the next YouTube star.
Airsoft sites ban/allow videos in certain matches.
Not rocket science. We manage in public spaces like toilets ok.
They also point to purple lanyards in conferences and suggest an equivalent in Airsoft.
Why is this comment going back to zero? Does Hacker News not have the ability to move forward? Is this a central tenant to the nihilism worship that is Hacker News?
Only if you publish the video, if there is indentifiable information or when the person is the center piece of your video.
If you are professional company, you have profesional that do this for you. If you are not professional, you can make the time, because you are not doing it often.
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.
You can wear a lanyard today!
It seems like you believe that if the government passed a law then it will have meaning in society? It's still as meaningless as if you just wore one today.
What happens then?
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.
You can inconvenience other people in a thousand different ways every day. And should be allowed to.
The idea that laziness or inconvenience ought to be outlawed... do you realize what you're saying? The kind of police state you're envisioning?
This is a principled thing. What's next, I get fined for walking slowly on the sidewalk? For holding up the line at the supermarket for a price check? For paying in dimes instead of dollar bills? Think about the legal principle you seem to be suggesting.
- littering
- jaywalking
- excessive noise
Etc.
And we impose fines for all of those — under the consistent logic that you can’t infringe on others use of public space with your own.
I’m glad that you can admit this is not about your usage of public spaces though — it’s just about you wanting to be a nuisance to others without consequence.
It's about not wanting to outlaw every possible nuisance. And you're right -- we do outlaw plenty of things. But we also have to draw the line somewhere.
Jaywalking is a great example. It was finally repealed in NYC. Since it's fundamentally a pedestrian-first city.
And public photography is one of those things where it's such a tiny nuisance, and the cost of regulating it would be so onerous, that we wisely choose not to.
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.
Everyone should be allowed to enjoy public spaces without you imposing on them for your activities — and that includes you taking photos.
Nothing about their desire not to be photographed requires that you not take photographs — just that if you do, without their permission and with identifiable features showing, you’ll have to take a few seconds to blur that before you upload it publicly.
Yes — that’s absolutely an antisocial imposition on their enjoyment.
And yes — you should be fined for doing that.
You don't think people just happen to be in the background?
> Everyone should be allowed to enjoy public spaces without you imposing on them for your activities — and that includes you taking photos.
No, they shouldn't. It's a balance. When people play frisbee, that's "imposing" on me too, because it's not easy for me to put a blanket down in the middle of their game. Should they be fined too? I don't think so. I think I can just live with the inconvenience of walking 30 more seconds.
And I don't even know what you're talking about with blurring people's faces being so easy. My camera app doesn't do that. And even if it did, manually clicking on every single face in all 40 photos from the park that don't belong to my friends and family? No thanks. People can live with their faces in the background online, just like I can live with people playing frisbee where I'd rather be sitting.
I mean, what's next -- I'm not allowed to quote things people say in public and attribute it to them? I'm not allowed to say so-and-so was in this public park in a blog post? You don't have privacy in public places, because they're public.
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.
We don't know that.
At the very least, these videos are being used to train models. That’s a good way to bypass the union contracts that prevent Hollywood from digitally cloning film extras.
At the moment, these things are not the problem of the person taking the video
According to some of the people here that would mean she had no right to participate in a regular activity.
Preventing anyone ever possibly taking pictures where you could be in the background is not the answer.
> Preventing anyone ever possibly taking pictures where you could be in the background is not the answer.
and asking not to be recorded at a recurring event.
While directly providing said stalker with information seems like a harmful, and likely prosecutable behavior, the indirect providing of information is not a burden the general public should bear for another parties already illegal actions.
My kid's school strictly bans peanut products due to at least one kid having a severe and potentially deadly allergy. It seems like a reasonable and necessary precautions to avoid harm or injury.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/introducing-pe...
What you've done is bring back the equivalence to a public place so that an absurd argument can be made about banning peanuts wholesale.
As far as any non-public situation goes, it's a simple discussion of consent and it's easy: just ask for it instead of feeling entitled to it.
I live in Taiwan. My friend and I were drinking beers by the river one night and decided to go on a late night bike ride, maybe 1am. We grabbed citybikes and tooled along the river, which in Taipei in many places is a nice bit of pavement next to massive mangroves and then the river itself. We were coming up on a brushy bit when a squad of completely kitted out soldiers came out of the bush with massive rifles, night vision goggles, full camo, geared to the nines. My buddy and I both nearly fell off our bikes and were immediately thinking the same thing: Oh fuck the PLA is here. Common knowledge is they'd come up that exact river and make straight for the presidential palace if they were gonna do their thing.
Turns out it was just very enthusiastic airsoft players. Apparently you can just play it wherever in Taipei, there's not really rules about it? So people play in the riversides at night.
Their kit was ridiculous. One guy had tracer pellets. They let us wear their night vision goggles and shoot trees. Great time.
If the two tactics don’t work separately, would they work when combined?
I would suggest Pokémon (fighting monsters after all), but apparently Nintendo lost its edge, considering that recent ICE debacle.
There aren't any social media sites that take down images of people wearing a Disney character on a shirt. That's not a thing.
You have to upload actual extended direct footage of a Disney movie.
Yes! Another EU regulation will solve this right quick.
How would you solve the problem in large scale, low effort way?
The problem is solved in a large scale low effort way (in many places)! If you are in public you can be legally filmed.
- When kids came to my workplace as part of educational program to show how people work - we gave them out papers, adults had to give approval that their child will be photographed and photo shared on social network. If any would opt out, we would just photograph without him. I think the sole purpose of that event was to photograph on some background with national flag or something and just publish it online.
Sometimes it is ridiculous, but still this thing works like this: the school or kindergarten wants class photo: please sign here that you consent. Basically this photo is not public but limited to families for all the children that attend that class. So seems kind of too much, but ok, can live with that.
I live in EU
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.
Meeting people in public has an obvious, logical bound. Being recorded does not. When you pass by someone in public, you're one of a thousand - passers-by see you once and then never again, they don't permanently remember you or what you did, no one but the people who know you care in the slightest.
When you get recorded, the data now exists forever, backed up in several places and basically impossible to get rid of. Most importantly, you can't ever know what will happen to this data in the future once it's there. Unlike meeting people in public, the internet doesn't forget. If in 20 years, someone puts up a service that let people upload a picture of your face and have it return a dossier with every bit of video you've ever appeared in, you have no recourse or say in the matter. It's "public data" after all, right? Basically equivalent to just being in the public!
> someone puts up a service that let people upload a picture of your face and have it return a dossier with every bit of video you've ever appeared in
Okay and why exactly would anybody be interested in that? Sounds like a pointless hypothetical
"Okay, so this new attack vector that hasn't existed before will appear, but maybe no one will ever want to use it" isn't a great argument.
I'm not sure how to explain it better that total aggregation of all data that's ever existed on you into one convenient blob is dangerous. Even answering your direct question is trivial: imagine that you break up with someone and they use your public data to stalk you. Or you have a conflict with your relatives, who can then use that data to see where you might be and what you might be up to.
But the obvious further implications of systems like those are second-, third-, fourth-order processing. So, we live in a society where you can look people up by their photos. Up next, the videos they appeared in will be location-tagged, with other services putting two and two together and selling everyone's location data, just put a photo in and you get a convenient timeline. Other services may sell information on what people and groups you were seen associating with. These are all very convenient things to offer - now, police investigations go a lot easier, breaking up inconvenient groups is less troublesome, employers and landlords can screen you for 'undesirable' qualities before ever seeing you. Lots of possibilities, lots of people who would love to use that.
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
People respond to a camera shoved in their face. It's not felt the same as simply being looked at.
EDIT: to bring a specific real-world example: A friend of mine does classes at a local studio that also offers martial arts courses, and some of the local right-wing bubble has gotten it in their head that this has to be "antifa combat training" and keeps screaming that this needs to be monitored. The current local government has been ignoring them, but a lot of people are probably quite happy now that there isn't an easy-to-get public record of who was there and "needs a visit".
You certainly dont want the government defining “not normal” people. Or maybe you do!
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.
Audio is different from video. This is technically illegal, as consent is explicitly required in the law for audio recording.
Someone walking around live streaming would become party to all the conversations.
If it's me, I'm leaving the party. If it's my children attending, I'm strongly recommending them to leave the party (or just leave with them, depending on their age). Live-streaming a birthday party of children is obnoxious behavior that should not be tolerated.
Because in German publishing images/recordings of an individual without consent violates basic constitutional rights. And that’s nothing to f** with.
If minors were involved you’d be in a whole different can of soup even.
So while I don’t advocate for violence - as others have hinted in this thread - a black eye could actually be the lesser negative outcome for such a person.
The downside is the misuse of the law, what happens constantly, to basically prohibit (at least in practice) ANY recording activity. Is not unheard of, I have seen and experienced myself quite a few times, for example, a tourist being stopped and asked to delete a video of a simple recording in a park (police called immediately), because a random stupid person was around and wants to show how good he knows his rights… (see sister comment)
If you're wandering around livestreaming and picking up conversations you're not a participant in, it's a violation of federal wiretapping laws.
If two people are talking at a party, and a third person obviously comes by within earshot, then the two people can either stop talking, or they can continue, but the third person is now party to the conversation.
I watched multiple videos from Portland ICE protest, multiple videos of ICE arresting people, all with audio. Half the people at protests are recording.
If you were right all that would be illegal.
The magic word is: "reasonable expectation of privacy".
If you're in public, like in streets, in the mall etc. you don't have reasonable expectation of privacy. You can be recorded, with audio, and it's legal.
The two party consent rules only apply to private conduct e.g. you have a phone conversation. In states with two party consent the other person can't record the conversation without notifying you.
What you describe as "US federal law" sound more like anti-wiretapping law i.e. I can't plant a bug in your house and record your conversations. Which is duh, but not relevant to being recorded while in public.
Your ICE protest example is performed in public, its a protest, its not meant to be private, thus fails the test of "reasonable expectation of privacy". Action taken by agents of the state are also public actions, this has been tried many times in court.
Two-party consent is not federal law and varies state-by-state. But again it requires that you actually be a party to consent.
And yes by "US Federal Law" I am referencing the anti-wiretapping laws which prohibit, among other things, interception of oral communication via electronic means unless at least one party consents.
It's usually simpler than that: if you see them recording you, and if they aren't trespassing (i.e. breaking the law otherwise); or you are on their property or on public property that they are legally permitted to use, which carries a posted sign telling you that you may be recorded, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Otherwise you do.*
Somebody could possibly hear something has nothing to do with it. Consenting to being heard is not consenting to being recorded. But maintaining your presence in a place where people are allowed to record is. If it's your party, tell them to put it away or leave. If it's their party, you leave. If you are recording surreptitiously and you are not working with law enforcement, it's probably not going to be admissible in court and if you publish it, you're going to get sued. Depending on your state and local laws, you are likely to lose badly.
-----
[*] All of this depending specifically on how the term is defined in your state and local laws. For example, video has often been separated from audio for pragmatic reasons; security cameras are meant to record physical acts, not conversations. For a second example, many states have decided that sending your voice over a wire to a designated recipient as an electronic signal is already consenting for the person receiving that signal to be able to record it and use it as they please; others have not. For a rationale in the second case, imagine that you didn't have the right to reveal a letter that was sent to you.
Just a note because I myself made the same argument very loudly 1-3 weeks ago...and was informed some states have different laws than I expected. Massachusetts, in particular.
(Note that MA limits clandestine recording, not the obvious recording in TFA blog about airsoft -- and it has been neither upheld nor overturned by SCOTUS)
https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law
>>> Massachusetts makes it a crime to secretly record a conversation, whether the conversation is in-person or taking place by telephone or another medium. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99. Accordingly, if you are operating in Massachusetts, you should always inform all parties to a telephone call or conversation that you are recording, unless it is absolutely clear to everyone involved that you are recording (i.e., the recording is not "secret"). Under Massachusetts's wiretapping law, if a party to a conversation is aware that you are recording and does not want to be recorded, it is up to that person to leave the conversation.
>>> This law applies to secret video recording when sound is captured. In a 2007 case, a political activist was convicted of violating the wiretapping statute by secretly recording video of a Boston University police sergeant during a political protest in 2006. The activist was shooting footage of the protest when police ordered him to stop and then arrested him for continuing to operate the camera while hiding it in his coat. As part of the sentencing, the court ordered the defendant to remove the footage from the Internet. From this case, it appears that you can violate the statute by secretly recording, even when you are in a public place.
Expectation of privacy is
Any jury with parents on it will acquit.
What jurisdiction has that rule? Are you sure you're not conflating simple audio recording with a recording of audio telecommunications?
(I'm sure everyone is different, but I've been there as the father-to-be, and I would have made a good effort of turning that live-stream into a live-colonoscopy.)
I am so sorry for your loss and I am out of words. Just, I just want to be with ya in silence for a while. I am sorry that you had to go through this. I am really speechless
But even now, yes you may have proved your point but death is so fucking weird and not talked about and sometimes I just get speechless, like someone just left the earth, let that sink in...
Honestly, I can somewhat both understand why he was live streaming now wanting more comments/everyone's final messages to go to her mother but at the same time, its definitely privacy invasive and might show their last moments and something of a behaviour I don't condone but I just don't know, now my opinion is mixed.
I didn't know the lady at all. I didn't even end up meeting the cousin, I heard about all this after the fact. My wife isn't broken up either - kind of distant family.
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.
- the victim knows they are fake, which provides some emotional distance (similar to when actors choose to use prostetics or doubles for a nude scene: the viewer doesn't know but the actor still feels more comfortable)
- most of them are bad enough that the discerning eye can spot it as an AI image (many chronically online people are scarily good at that)
- they can be proven to be fake because they are just an imagined version of your body ('look, I have a tatoo/mole/scar/blemish here that isn't in the nude, it's obviously fake')
AI nudes are still pretty bad, but services that turn up nude images of you by indexing the internet with face-detection are way worse
Also, if you down sample the quality of the video, it would be even harder to tell it was a fake.
That’s neither here nor there. Would you want even a fake nude of you online?
That's neither here nor there, the claim was that deepfakes were a replacement for actual nudes, but you're maybe overlooking that the actual invasiveness is an important part of what the abuser finds appealing about the real thing.
Both are of course terrible, they're both abusive and both are becoming illegal in more and more places, but one is more invasive than the other.
I'm also aware there are probably a number of guys on this site who work in that space so just as a message to you if you're reading: You suck.
According to my 18 year old niece, FB is just for old people anyway. (Thank god I never really used it). They still use Instagram, though.
Privacy concerns .. are little in general. Hard to be popular, when you avoid the mainstream plattforms. And yes, private groups are on the rise everywhere.
It's given rise to a much richer form of social media and "personal brand" building when done well, IMO. Although I have noticed the tide starting to turn, with the amount of us-vs-them sentiment all over the internet lately.
Honestly, if I was a kid just discovering social media today, I'd be extremely guarded too.
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.
As a rule of thumb, for my children at school, I refuse any use of their image if it's not for something that was already possible in the eighties.
Publishing school party pictures and videos for the whole world to see was impossible in the 80s, I thus don't allow it and if it happens, it's an invasion of their private life (as per Belgian law at least).
Hanging on the school walls some pictures of the classes, or children, doing some activities: that's OK, it could already be done in the 80s and might be useful for the school community. Publishing these in a printed yearbook: I accept. Publishing it on the Internet in electronic format: this was not possible in the 80s, thus I refuse.
I think this time strikes a nice balance for everyone involved.
By the way, in Belgium, you are allowed to film in public places, but not to misuse the image of others if it's disrespecting their private life, unless for legal requirements.
There’s nothing stopping us from saying this sucks, it’s socially toxic, and we’re not going to put up with it anymore.
A couple of years ago I went to a restaurant and for some reason automatically told the hostess, "Two, non-smoking."
She looked at me like I had lobsters crawling out of my ears.
States usually, most of EU/Europe is banned (but not everywhere).
It’s not, and your two examples are perfect proof of it.
Indoor smoking bans have been implemented in several countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans
https://health.ec.europa.eu/tobacco/smoke-free-environments_...
Countries applying the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic only allow honking in two specific situations. In addition, it’s culturally dependent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_horn#Regulation
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/perspectives/readers-views/the-...
Don’t assume something is an immutable part of life just because it was in place when you were already born. Change can and does happen.
Solution here is to use a private airsoft field then make no filming a condition of entry. If they violate the rule, trespass.
Let's assume it's true. What does it mean? That pretending to ruthlessly murder people while not being recorded is a niche kink and society doesn't owe this guy any special accomodations.
Thanks to the internet, which publishing prowess he abhors, I'm sure, this guy will still be able to find group of fellow degenerates so he can have fun with his exact perversion down to a T.
Or he can relax his requirements and perhaps attend swingers club instead of airsoft, because they don't usually record their hobby. Or keep doing pretend murders but relax his stance about recording it towards more mainstream sensibilities.
Is this sufficient engagement with the topic for you?
Or do I have to spell out that privacy is not special. You aren't organically owed anything when you are with other people, except for what current societal sensibilities dictate.
I think for airsoft a facemask and pseudonym will do so you don't even need to invent anything, just apply it.
Do you think they hoped their blog post would have the force of law? I think the many conversations started on the front page of HN were probably more than sufficient impact. You _really_ don't need to be so defensive of the status quo.
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.
Asking guests to not take photos is such a faux pass that the couple has destroyed their reputation completely.
They can have a quiet and private ceremony instead if they have stage fright.
> They can have a quiet and private ceremony instead if they have stage fright.
That would be called "a wedding".
> That would be called "a wedding".
That would be called a secret wedding, a very popular trope in old romance novels.
A clandestine wedding would often leave significant doubt about the facts of the ritual, the participants, and their actual state of mind. In most places it really is not legal to conduct a clandestine wedding without strict regulation and some sort of documentation, before and after the fact.
No officiant: invalid. No witnesses: invalid. Prior bond: invalid. Duress or coercion: invalid. These are all really, really important reasons for public ceremonies attended by, essentially, randos off the street.
Not sure why you think that?
Although weddings can be in public places, they don't have to be and it's quite common for only invited guests (ie not the public) to be present.
In this case we're talking about a public wedding as opposed to a secret wedding.
Thus: A normal wedding with a normal amount of invited guests is one of the most non-secret events to exist.
Asking for no photos is like participating in a big sports event as an athlete and demanding nobody takes photos.
private !== secret
You seem to have this concept crossed in your thinking. Just because people know about it doesn't make it not private. Try getting into an event at Davos. Try getting into any well known event without an invitation. You'll see just how not public they are.
The fact that people think it is acceptable to post pictures of other people on their social sites says it all. This couple's request is not egregious. Just because you can't imagine not posting something doesn't mean everyone else thinks the same way. This is just another example to me of how few people think of others first, and only ever think about "me me me"
That's exactly what I adressed in my comment above. You're explaining to me exactly what I've explained to you.
Public can mean something which has been publicized = made known to the general public. In this case it doesn't mean that everybody is invited.
You have a very hostile tone, for no apparent reason. Feel free to blow off steam if you need to, but try at least to understand the argument I'm making.
You are not stating the same thing. You are saying that an invite only is not a private event. You've apparently misread the bit you quoted as it is a double negative; "> Just because people know about it doesn't make it not private". Just because people know about a private event does not mean the event is public. Knowledge of the event is not what makes it private. What makes it private is the host's restriction of who can attend.
Also, I'm not hostile. You're being defensive on an indefensible position and not liking the fact you are being called out for that position. There's a difference.
You ended with:
> Asking for no photos is like participating in a big sports event as an athlete and demanding nobody takes photos.
A private, invite only, wedding isn’t comparable to a sports event that you described. Because this is by definition public. Why? Because anyone can buy a ticket to that event. That makes it open to the public. Yes, you need a ticket to enter. But it’s not invite only.
Imagine a big baseball/football/soccer event. The stadium is packed. Anybody can film to their liking. This is the public part. Now imagine the owners box way at the top. Not one of these humans down in the regular seats will be able to get up there. It’s invite only. That makes it private. Even if there are many people in that box.
But the owner (or in case of the wedding the couple getting married) chose who Would be allowed to partake in that event. And so, they also get to make the rules.
If you, with your attitude would be at a private event I was hosting, you wouldn’t be there long. Because you still need to learn the difference between public (in theory anybody can attend and the host doesn’t get to choose) and private (only the host chooses who can attend).
Try using a pair of words. Publicly announced vs publicly accessible.
An impending wedding is usually one of the most publicized events in any city. The banns must be published, typically in a special section of the newspaper. In order to give notice for anyone who may object or know about a prior bond. Also any hint of duress or urgency that may impede free consent. The banns are the actual execution of the ceremonial “callout” you see in films.
The witnesses of a wedding are not optional. The witnesses serve as representatives of the general public. Typically a clandestine wedding would be invalid without witnesses to verify and vouch for the identity, presence, and consent of bride and groom.
Taking photos for verification is sort of after-the-fact, and it would be most unfortunate for the banns to miss the mark until after the ceremony, or the consummation.
But only crazy people would consider a wedding ceremony “private” or “closed to the public” other than “renting an officiant” and flying off to a Caribbean elopement that only your billionaire girlboss bridesmaids can afford.
Most ordinary weddings *are* invitation only in Blighty. Both church weddings and secular weddings held at registry offices, town halls and the like.
By “Blighty” are you referring to Great Britain, or a town in NSW, population 326? That seems to be a vast difference!
And I am at a loss to imagine security guards checking invitations at a church door and giving heave-ho to the unworthy. What particular denominations have you polled on this? How many different types of ceremonies have you crashed?
I refer to my homeland as “The States” out of courtesy to those from Canada, UK, Australia, but I had to rack my brains, and Wikipedia, about “Blighty” because it seems archaic, stilted, and arcane in a tech forum.
I’ve heard England called a lot of things by its citizens, but I was under the impression that “Ol’ Blighty” died out with Queen Victoria.
At least online, yes.
In all my years on the Internet and written forums, as well as watching British TV for 50 years, there has been no notable usage of “Blighty” that caught my attention.
If I had been aware of the usage, (other than archaic slang) I would’ve learned it sooner. But it’s notable that this Anglophile hadn’t been bothered until the Year of Our Lord and Reign of His Majesty Charles III, 2025.
You are at a loss to imagine something that is extremely common worldwide. Though not "security guards". You don't need security guards, because when a little lady tells you to please come back in an hour and a half, people don't push her aside and scream "freedom!".
Especially with churches in most cases nobody will be shown the door especially as in (Christian) church tradition the wedding is before God and the community, which traditionally is the village. Nonetheless many cultures will see it as somewhat private. Especially the reception or a non-church ceremony.
I feel like it's pretty strange (and mildly rude) to insist no one take/post photos of a wedding, and also very rude to take/post photos when asked not to.
Not sure why you're using the word "secret" there? Something being not-public (ie invitation only) doesn't mean it's secret or hidden. It just means it's not public.
I think they asked guests not to post photos of the couple.
A large component of society has no particular code of ethics, religion, or internal moral framework. End result is if it's legal I can do it, and I shouldn't feel bad for doing so.
This is a hilarious example of pot calling the kettle black.
I think you will find it is both good etiquette and very common to make polite requests ("rules") of guests you invite..... whether these be to 'bring a bottle', 'smoke outside', 'wear black tie', 'wear your birthday suit' or 'don't film us'.
If you can't accommodate such requests, don't go.
Your idea of a polite society sounds rather rude to me.
Are you genuinely suggesting that there is a basic social rule that says no other rules can be impressed on guests at an event? I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny.
Every event has rules — it’s inherent in being “an event” as opposed to pure chaos. Whether or not the rules are strange is open to individual interpretation. If you can’t abide by the rules of an event you are not welcome at the event. People’s polite tolerance of others’ anti-social behavior does not mean the behavior is welcome.
> Are you genuinely suggesting that there is a basic social rule that says no other rules can be impressed on guests at an event?
Absolutely, in the case of strange, unusual rules. If you're invited for dinner to somebody and they ask that you oblige to things which are outside of the norm, would you be very keen to go? Or would you make up an excuse and do something else?
It seems you are trying to say "You're not welcome here!" to people who already declined an invite?
These things are not mutually exclusive.
If you don’t want to abide by the rules, you are not welcome and you should decline. Perhaps the organizer isn’t aware of your preference and your declining helps inform them. If they prefer your presence more than they like their silly rules, they might change them.
Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.
It's really not about this. Many (most?) people don't want to go to events where the hosts are acting weird against their guests. When it comes to weddings, it's not unusual that you haven't seen the people for several years. And in that time people change.
> Deciding to attend a social gathering where you intentionally ignore the rules that you don’t like is narcissistic and rude behavior.
That's why I've said now about fourteen times here now, that people are going to decline an invite to events with strange "rules". For an adult the normal thing is that events you are invited to do not have any rules at all, because everybody already knows exactly what is appropriate. So real people have a low tolerance for those kind of things. If you're looking for "narcissistic", then maybe look at those people inventing strange rules for what is supposed to be their friends and family?
Maybe it is because HN is a forum for people who work in very corporate settings and are accustomed to having to follow a lot of silly rules without the option to decline?
Just like a dress code for a wedding is fine, but if they said "also you need to wear blue cotton underwear" I'd think that was a bit inappropriate to require.
Lets replace take videos with something maybe more obviously offensive to most people:
Most of my friends don't insult my mother / wife / husband / partner when I invite them around for games, or a nice dinner, or a birthday. If they started to I would ask them not to come, or invite them on the condition they don't do that. If they don't come because they have to do that constantly, and I don't want to participate I'm not sure what I'm losing.
I personally find not respecting my privacy preference in my home pretty darn insulting.
Also people have been having friends over for dinner 100x longer (probably much longer, but I'm just going with how long things have been written down) than video recording has existed, so I'm unsure what traditions you're trying to uphold.
Also I have guests over for dinner because I enjoy their company, not tradition.
Important context since it seems you have never been to a wedding: they are almost all invite-only.
The day is not about you. Just like people are free to exclude children from weddings, if they ask you not to take photos and you take umbrage at that, you need to take a hard look at yourself. It's. Not. About. You.
I've never made any strange rules for guests when I host, and I've politely declined the very rare cases when I've received such an invite. Because I know it's not about me.
I think it's also pretty weird to ask people not to take photos though.
edit: "no photos during the ceremony" is different than "no photos the entire event", obviously
It's incredibly frustrating. I also think it's really strange that when something happens in public, the default isn't to look to see if the person isn't OK anymore, it's to pull out a camera phone and start filming.
Counterpoint
I've never known such requests be ignored here in Blighty. Ditto requests not to upload photos to social media.
More commonly though, I've been to weddings where they had a small private ceremony (just the couple, officiant, and a handful of family), and then a large reception for everyone in the evening.
It’s therefore not uncommon if it’s local for more distant friends of family, neighbours, etc. to pop along to the ceremony at invitation of the couple or their parents as a result, but not to be invited to the party part. Sometimes older guests will just come to ceremony too.
That's an insane legal requirement. I'll do the legal wedding in the most unceremonious, quickest manner possible, and then have my real ceremony in privacy and not tell anyone about it.
I could never find out if this was a common thing in the UK or not.
The ceremony is technically open to the public in any case, usually.
Less than 20% of weddings are religious (and a smaller subset of this will be in churches), and I don’t really hear of anyone just turning up at the ceremony of someone they don’t know.
That's a likely a fair underestimate because many religious marriages aren't legally valid because of various requirements that the Church of England doesn't have to follow as the state church. In Catholic churches for e.g. they need to register the building, then either appoint the priest as an authorised person or get a registrar to come to every ceremony as in a civil wedding. They do usually do this but most non-Christian religions don't bother with this at all and so the couple end up just having a civil ceremony first and the religious one after.
Certainly the first time it had ever come up, but it made sense to me. If you're invited to someone's wedding, it's only natural to respect their wishes.
Not everything needs to be documented online!
People with such little respect for boundaries are just not welcome in my life.
I - for example - ditched every contact to my aunt after she accused my SO of being just a gold digger. At my dad's (her brother's) funeral. So no - I don't care for blood. I care for being a decent human being and treating everybody with the respect they deserve, as long as the reciprocate. If not, I treat them with the interpersonal equivalent of a killfile.
Honestly made the whole event better
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.
Taking a screenshot from a video for exactly this reason is incredibly common. Look at any photograph accompanying a political story about a figure from "the other party".
See for example this Reddit post about the "triggered" meme origin: > Ironically, if you ever get a chance to see the video of this incident, this woman and the man she's speaking with are actually having a polite discussion. But... She has very animated facial expressions and the photographer just happened to catch this frame at an inopportune moment.
So it seems to me that since a video is simply thousands of photographs with a soundtrack, video is strictly more invasive than photography.
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/adyt1d/comment/hvp04...
The compression artefacts help there, because they make it very clear this was taken from a video, meaning one should look up the source because it probably exists.
That is a perfect example of how a photograph could be worse than a video.
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.
This situation compounded very gradually. In the late 90s, it was extremely common for young people to make each other laugh by doing dumb things in public (sometimes knowingly on camera) that they’d never expect to be seen by a wide audience. Then in the early 00s, the experience of going a little viral (just within your college Facebook community, before the word ‘viral’ was a thing) was actually pretty common and this started to make people just a little more guarded about being photographed. So those who got filmed doing something drunk/dumb would be more likely to go more viral, as it was now a rarer sight. And so on. It’s a recursive effect that made us all duller and more image-conscious and anxious in public. This process took a couple of decades to end up where we are now. It’s not just some new modern prissiness.
Realistically unless you are doing something absolutely unforgivable it will be forgotten about in a few days/weeks. At worst you will become a reaction emote.
Also going viral is a huge opportunity. Some viral people have ended up in commercials, podcasts etc.
Lets not pretend it is all negative.
> Then in the early 00s, the experience of going a little viral (just within your college Facebook community, before the word ‘viral’ was a thing) was actually pretty common and this started to make people just a little more guarded about being photographed. So those who got filmed doing something drunk/dumb would be more likely to go more viral, as it was now a rarer sight. And so on.
No this is a rewriting of history. What happened is that employers started looking through potential hires and/or current employees and quizzing them about getting drunk at a party a few years ago. This seemed to happen in the US more than other places, or maybe it was reported there more.
Then everyone with any sense made their profile semi-private (friends only) on Facebook.
Also a lot of the stuff that went viral was often clever marketing. There are advertising agencies where they have case studies detailing how they have done it.
Also there is a whole genre of streaming where people literally act outrageously in public, called IRL streaming. People have gone/are going to prison in hopes of going viral.
> It’s a recursive effect that made us all duller and more image-conscious and anxious in public. This process took a couple of decades to end up where we are now.
This is absolute nonsense. I am old enough to remember how people acted before social media in is largely the same while out in public. In fact I would say it was actually the opposite of what you claim.
There's just always been people uncomfortable with it.
I suspect a lot of that is more to do with them being worried about their how they look on the film than actually being on the film itself.
> There's just always been people uncomfortable with it.
Of course there are going to be people uncomfortable with it. I am. The issue is that it isn't ever going to go backwards and being video recorded in public by amateurs has been around for almost 40 years. The ship has sailed a long time ago.
Happens all the time.
In many ways an unenforced right is worse than no right at all.
I agree with your broader point. Recognizable people get their photos published on social media every second of every day and, while someone can probably find an outlier example where someone got prosecuted for doing so, it's incredibly rare at the least--even in countries where it's technically a violation of some law.
But, if you are a public figure, as in you are a media person, a celebrity or politician. As in you are actually searching for publicity, the situation changes. Here the beauty of shades of grey and work for lawyers begins.
Because while you have lost the clear cut black or white, there are still things that will get the person publishing into trouble.
When I started my career in online journalism this was a very long discussed topic while we had our course at the Academy for Journalism in Hamburg.
But for ordinary people, the right to your image is a quite strong protection.
This is at the heart of what is going on. Society of the Spectacle is not an easy read, but it most definitely is pertinent to what is going on. Instagram is the final boss!
The UK is a special place because culturally it belongs to the anglo-saxon sphere but legally it inherited the strict EU personality rights.
I hear US culture is fairly dominant in the USA, too?
> I hear chickens lay eggs, too?
I wonder how much of this is people expecting that ANY media presence will throw them into the troubles people experience when they have all the media presence. I know if I blow up big enough (not much of a threat right now) that someone will come to hurt me, no matter how I am. That's not about me, it's about statistics. If I blew up that big I could probably afford security…
I think some people assume you'll be confronted with that sort of problem right away just by appearing on youtube etc. Sure you will… eventually. Or if you're staggeringly unlucky.
To sum it up, in my experience, people are just not willing to respect your boundaries if you make them aware they overstepped yours. They will always go for some excuse, instead of just accepting they erred.
Like how you should have a dash cam for your side in a vehicle collision. Although, maybe sufficiently convincing fake videos will make it a moot point in the future.
Your perception of this as a risk probably suggests cultural and/or generational differences.
But for the actual circumstances of the fine article’s author, video is a norm of the community the author seeks to join. Within the community, video is an established practice and making a video rig signifies a higher degree of commitment to the community.
Not accepting the use of video, is at least a partial rejection of the community values. Accepting video is a tradeoff for participating in community practices. The practical alternative is usually to find or build an alternative community. [0]
To put it another way, joining the bird watching community means keeping lists. Yes, of course you can just watch birds for your personal pleasure, but documentation is a core community activity.
[0] sure logically it is possible to change a community, but marginal members (e.g. new, casual, low status) are rarely in position to overturn established practice and run the risk of being set up for the agendas of established members.
How do you define community? Seems like a bit rigid of a implied requirement.
The whole idea of conflating community and publicity or some documentation requirement seems a bit silly to me, and it's definitely not rare, but an individual is perfectly within their right to go about engagement in their hobby with other people who have similar interests on whichever terms they like, which seems like community to me, as long as some form of commonly understood communication is present.
Likewise the people who do want to establish certain requirements, gates if you will, have the right to do so, but not as a whole. Country clubs don't and shouldn't have exclusive domain over golf, and I don't give the slightest fuck about recording myself at the bouldering gym or skateboarding, but that shouldn't prevent me from being part of either culture or community unless a specific club within those forms around publication.
I'd concede that it's possible that a community could exist in such a way that the act of documenting is the exclusive basis for which people are able to communicate at all, in which case perhaps that defines the boundary, but again it seems like it would be rare for that to be so pervasive as to encapsulate the entirety of a hobby.
Lists and records fill the role a physical collection plays in collecting hobbies.
The whole idea of conflating community and publicity or some documentation requirement seems a bit silly to me
Usually that simply means a community is not for you and the birdwatching hobby is not for me either…though I have driven a few hundred miles out of my way to see the California Condors at Vermillion Cliffs (I didn’t write it down).
On the other hand, not-for-me just means not for me to me. I can see why people do it and it is pleasant to ask them what they are looking at and congratulate them if they tell me it’s a lifer…
Anyway, birds fascinate me and I am blessed to live along the Pacific Flyway in a location with abundant wildlife and natural areas outside my door (it’s why I sometimes chat with birders). But it only took me one look at what the birdwatching community values to know it was not for me (same as most religions, political movements, ideologies, etc.).
I wasn't so much curious about the mechanics of the hobby, although it is interesting, rather what defines it as a "community". Like what qualifies or doesn't qualify as being in or out of the "community"? If I make a list of birds I've seen, and don't share it with anyone, am in a community? If I share a photo on Instagram and mention it in passing to my close friend, am I in a community then? Do I need to be on some common platform, communicating at all about other bird lists? My grandfather kind of has a similar hobby with planes, but I'm sure he doesn't think of himself as part of a global community of plane enthusiasts, yet his local wood carving community is a place he goes and talks to people he knows by name and has spent years around, evidently a community with the requirement that you're into wood carving
Norms and continuity maybe?
But my point is that air soft has norms and if video is among them, then that’s just how it is.
And for what it is worth your theoretical exercise of keeping private lists of birds is fine by me. But if it is just you, it is not a community because that’s not how we use the word community.
Likewise, the community of birdwatchers typically uses the word birdwatching to include the kind of activities I mentioned.
I’ve been a member and gyms where the owner will start taking videos and pictures of the class that ultimately end up on social media or in marketing material. I’m not ok with it and I get incredible uncomfortable when I’m in some weird position to do an exercise and a camera starts heading my way.
Any time an unwanted camera is around there is some level of anxiety that starts creeping up. Maybe this is, in part, why so many of today’s youth have anxiety disorders. How can anyone just relax if they have to worry about anything they might say or do being on camera, and then posted for the world to see.
I was at a party not too long ago where most people were 45+, and some kids that were too young to have phones. No one was on their phones, and people seemed free to dance and whatever. The second one person took out their phone to take a picture/video the vibe shifted drastically, and the owner of the house told them to put it away, so people could go back to enjoying themselves instead of being worried about an embarrassing picture of video that might surface later.
I’ve seen so many good times destroyed by cameras.
It’s a bit of a paradox. When I’m looking for a gym, I find pictures incredibly helpful, but I don’t want them taken of me as a member there.
Or much simpler: when the photos of a class are taken, simply ask beforehand who disagrees with being photographed and/or photos containing him/her made public, so that for those few minutes where the photos are taken, these people can get out of the picture.
Always
There exist sufficiently many people who love to have pictures of them being available publicly. Just look at basically some arbitrary Instagram page. Thus, there exists no need to pay (at least until, say, 95 % of society is really reluctant to have pictures of them publicly accessible).
Good idea
More people should understand you are no more morally obligated to behave sociably toward those exhibiting antisocial behavior than you are to stay your hand from a man who hits you.
Then there are those who film in the locker rooms which arguably should be reason to ban them from said gyms.
Imo these types should stick to "influencer gyms". They exist. Alphaland in Texas is a great example; a friend of mine frequented it as she started her bodybuilding page. Worked great for her. Just stay the hell out of the "normal people" gyms.
That's where my anxiety comes in when I see people filming. I am MASSIVELY aware of my face, body, and genuinely everything about myself when I run into that, because I do not want to be tried in the court of public opinion.
Their fans are rabid. They will find you, and they will ruin your life. The Internet isn't just a funny little place anymore. People get doxed.
I think it's a matter of rudeness or carelessness about other people's rights and wellbeing. I want to record this so screw the rules and other babies' privacy.
The classes are pretty mixed, it's Belgium after all. If anything perhaps the next generation is so exposed to TikTok that they might find things less compelling to record? I can't say.
I wish respect and treasuring things without video evidence were on the rise.
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.
> should someone take someone else’s photograph they should need their consent to post the photo publicly
> I don’t think posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public
That all sounds pretty similar to what I know from EU countries. Of course, there are also exceptions like photographing groups of people etc., but I don't think that goes the spirit of the balderdash's concept.
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.
Pretty similar in the UK.
In most 'fun' events like this with random members of the public said venue has a monetary interest in ensuring people can film in the vast majority of the cases. People go there to have fun, and sharing videos of said fun is but one more way to ensure they get future customers.
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.
In case that's still not clear, you need a ticket to enter a stadium, unlike your local public parks or public library, or, like, streets.
The right to take photos of random people without consent in public spaces, is NOT the same as the right to publish those photos online for the world to see and as a theoretically permanent discoverable archive.
And let me know one single instance where someone gets sued for posting a photo of someone appearing in public space in the US.
People sue over much less in the US.
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_...
2. Recording people without their consent still happens in lot of other countries other than the US. I bet I'm in tons of YouTube videos showing skiing in the Alps.
In addition laws in the US tend to protect the rich very well and get wholesale ignored for the poor. That is Jeffrey Bezos will punish you with the full extent of the law for taking a video of him beating a baby fur seal to death with a bat, while star-wars kid will be begging for venmo donations in order to get thousands of copies of video taken down while law enforcement ignores the situation.
E.g. author says:
> But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conference
I've been to many such conferences, and they all make it very clear that all the photos can be taken and used in advertising by anyone, both in agreements as well as entrance banners. Same as in US.
Most people are pretty reasonable and aren't aggressive with their picture taking. But there are almost certainly photos of you online whatever the local country laws may say.
An individual can record you on the street without problems.
A crew can't record you on the street for anything that will be aired on tv/cinema without your signing that you give your permision.
A Youtuber can record you on the street without problems.
Mix that with the lack of general shame for this stuff and you have this weird state of affairs where you don't want to do anything slightly risky. Nothing silly, nothing that can cause you to be looked over on job apps, nothing that you enjoy by yourself but others find "weird".
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?
Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.
> Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them. If someone came to Switzerland and started complaining that they can't install a doorbell camera, then it would also be a case of them 'not liking it' - but they have a right to voice their opinion.
Obviously the law is different in different places.
However. The person is talking about Newbury which I used to live near, which is in the UK. So they are talking about their experience in the UK.
So the only law the is applicable here is UK law.
> The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them.
He specifically says at the end "This isn’t about what is legal". I also don't believe he understands the law, since he often conflates/misuses the use of term private throughout the entire article.
What he understands as private isn't what is understood by almost anyone (both legal and colloquially).
I had a guy at Walmart yesterday call the cops on me because I took a picture of the strip mall it was in on a small point and shoot and he assumed I was for some reason taking a picture of him, his wife, and kid. He was literally just a random car in the middle of a public parking lot. The officer talked to him and asked that I stepped away and then she came to me. The conversation went exactly like this.
Before she could even start to talk I told her I assumed that she knew that there was no expectation of privacy in public and that I could take a thousand pictures and there would be nothing that she could do about it. She agreed. She then asked if I'd like to give her my name (because she had no right to demand I do), and I said no I wouldn't like that. Then came the kicker. Would you like to just show me you don't have a picture of him. I said no I won't because I did nothing wrong and there's no reason for you to see my pictures. All of these were phrased as requests to bypass illegal search because she knew she was in the wrong even questioning me about it. People seem to really be the main character in the most boring story ever, at least in their minds. I have a healthy disregard for feigned authority anyway and was so indignant that I almost took some pictures of them while they talked. Trampling rights because Jim Bob is upset that someone dared take a picture in his direction rubs me the wrong way.
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.
>robbers
Why would a criminal take time to comb through random, anonymous, uncategorized images of people to ambiguously identify someone who might not be home (and might not even have a house worth breaking into), when it’s much easier to just stake out wealthy neighborhoods and definitively see who’s not home and who has unsecured valuables, as has been done for centuries?
>stalkers
So said stalker would have to run facial recognition software on every image on the internet to find the handful that might incidentally contain their victim? Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.
>Google et al.
The solution here is to regulate what Google et al. can do with your data, not regulate what people can post online.
This argument is so poorly formed I almost believe it's in bad faith.
Both you and I know that a stalker wouldn't do that. People tend to congregate their online behaviors in a very small circle of sites based upon their physical locations, I'm not going to index files in Japan to find someone in Iowa. Digital footprints are both large and small at the same time.
> when it’s much easier to just stake out wealthy neighborhoods and definitively see who’s not home and who has unsecured valuables
Because it's risky and time consuming to be there in person. In fact it's even easier to setup a camera in said neighborhoods and have software track users behavior then to sit around there yourself.
Stalkers often have knowledge of the victim’s friends and associates and have no problem combing through their social media looking for photos.
> Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.
PIs will not do work for people without a legitimate purpose, as they could lose their license. Stalkers with ill intent will also be leaving a paper trail if they hire a PI. And non-PIs may be able to use some PI methods, but they won’t be able to access the full range of PI tools or PI relationships.
Or use an image search engine that does facial recognition. Already exist, and likely to become more common.
Knowing your target's movements and schedule has also been an integral part of crime since forever. Also, you are again focusing on the generic - the goal being hitting any wealthy target, not this particular target.
> So said stalker would have to run facial recognition software on every image on the internet to find the handful that might incidentally contain their victim? Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.
Maybe they know their target likes airsoft but, probably due to the stalking, has changed locations to try and get away. Looking at the few local airsoft places is probably way cheaper than hiring a PI. Can one easily hire a PI for stalking purposes, anyway? Seems like an industry that has some strong regulations but I don't really know.
Besides, you don't need to worry about things like a PI or finding random images if, for example, a friend or acquaintance in your group posts a lot. The stalker need only find that one person to keep an eye on their target - a very common tactic by abusers, by the by: being aware of your target's social circle and using it to keep tabs on them.
This also seems to focus on the physical aspect of it, as if getting attacked/kidnapped is the only possible result, but constantly getting messages like "Looks like you had fun at X" from an abuser can cause harm too.
> The solution here is to regulate what Google et al. can do with your data, not regulate what people can post online.
There are 2 separate issues. Should we regulate what people can post online? And should we expect people to respect our privacy, even if they're not legally required to? One is a legal question, the other is social/cultural.
If you don't want someone to make a record of the photons that arrive at a particular place because those photons bounced off you, then don't let them go out into the world far beyond your private space.
Businesses recording security footage is different because there is some type of social contract that they won't publicly release it. If I knew for example that the grocery store I shop at was posting security videos to youtube I would go spend money at another grocery store. I can choose not to go to a sporting event concert because I don't want to be on a jumbo tron. I have way to choose whether or not some random person will record me while I'm working out or taking my dog out.
It isn't necessarily about consequences. I don't want photos of me on the internet. I don't like the idea that other people get to do that without my consent.
I don't have any power to stop it. I am not even sure I should, or what limits it should have. But I don't think I should need to justify that as a preference.
* Don't want to be ridiculed if you look silly (it is airsoft, after all)
* It's distracting to be videoed
* You have a stalker trying to find information about you
* Makes you feel pressure to put on make up and look "decent"
* Something you say might sound bad out of context and result in being ostracized or otherwise socially punished
* You might have a secret airsoft tactic or codes you don't want people to know about
* You don't want facial recognition trained on you
* You told someone you couldn't go to their party because you are sick and don't want to get caught lying
* etc etc
These aren't all huge issues, but they are reasonable.
How about if you're overweight, doing airsoft to try to get into shape, and bellyflop into some mud on video?
That's social media crack right there, boys and girls.
Can you understand why someone might not want that kind of thing posted?
That is not the point. If someone doesn't want to be in someone else's photos or videos without consent, it is their choice. It is their face afterall. It doesn't matter why. They do not owe an explanation.
The polite thing to do would be to blur other people's faces (or remove people altogether) before adding our photos to the gajillion others already floating around on the internet.
Imagine for example that you were the CEO of a software company having an affair with the head of HR...
Even if it were a gray area, the serious penalties would probably be enough to make someone want to blur it out.
Would it? I'm certainly not a lawyer or ITAR expert, but I would think that if you walked through a public space where you couldn't positively confirm that everyone present (and everyone who might view it transitively via video recordings, live streams, etc.) was OK to access the materiel on the shirt, that would be considered an export and you'd be in big trouble.
It's not just physical items like munitions, but also things like transfers of information (blueprints, technical data, documentation, etc.) or services being performed, regardless of where (inside or outside the USA) or how (paper, electronic, verbal, etc.) it takes place.
Have a look at [1] § 120.50 (Export) and § 120.63 (definition of Foreign person).
>if someone looks at the T-shirt and transmits it out the country they'd be the exporter, not the person wearing the T-shirt.
I believe the person wearing the shirt would be considered the exporter, as that is the point where the information moves from (I'm assuming for the purposes of conversation) an USA citizen to a foreign person.
But again, I could be wrong. Safest bet is not to print the shirt to begin with :)
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-22/chapter-I/subchapter-M...
Here's an example of T-shirt with a machinegun blueprint on it for instance, for sale in USA without any checks as to your immigration status [note US law considers a device that induces automatic fire as a 'machinegun' despite the fact the device itself isn't really a gun]:
https://ctrlpew.com/product/yankee-boogle-tee-gatalog-editio...
On remand to the district court, and on the eve of changes to the federal export regulations, the U.S. State Department offered to settle the case, and on July 27, 2018, Defense Distributed accepted a license to publish its files along with a sum of almost $40,000.[6][7]
It seems maybe they might allow you to export it, but you'd have to get a license first, even if they were required to issue it to you could take years of lawsuits that a youtuber probably will not pursue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...
Being recorded in 4k from different angles including action cams on people's heads on the dance floor, is a far cry from the relative anonymity of festivals of old. I remember when the only people who'd see you all bright eyed and bushy tailed were other participants in the party mayhem, which is how it should be.
Nobody bats an eye, I assume because we're already out in public, basically in bathing suits.
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.
When I was young, it would have been playing open mics as a teenager. I wasn't amazing but it's really important to play publicly in order to grow as a musician, and that means kinda sucking in public. I would not have become a musician if I didn't have that supportive community.
In this day and age, if I were to do that, someone would probably live stream it or film it on their phone and put it on YouTube, then It would get found by the kind of awful kids that like to make other people feel awful for no reason, then they would have found my like Facebook or social media or something, I'd catch shit at school, and I never would have touched an instrument again.
So yeah, save your highlight reels for someone else, thanks.
I guess the concern then shifts to dragnet automated surveillance of it.
The cost of filming is very low. Even people who aren't interested in taking pictures or filming now have a camera with them at all times.
I remember a village in Africa about 20 years ago where people thought cameras stole their soul.
Technology steals everything it can. I mean think of all the data that went into google maps or chatgpt, to only name a couple of apps.
Laws aren't sacred, they are just the rule over the living by the dead. All of our privacy laws were made when the technology , culture and demographics were completely different.
I have no problem with the idea that everyone on the street is recording from their porch... as long as it's for their own siloed use, and it takes a conscious act for them to share it. If someone wants to stalk you, they'd need conscious assistance from your neighbors. If the police are tracking a hit-and-run, they need to ask people for footage during a time period, etc.
But the moment someone says "hey let's network all those with object/face recognition so that you can easily trace every person walking down the street", then we've got a problem.
With AI this is entirely possible and if you are going to post videos on youtube or anything, you should be able to afford the removal of non-verified participants.
In the order of environmental issues, these plastic pellets are insignificant.
If you want to get up in arms about something, look at how many container loads of plastic feedstock falls off of ships per year and you'll see a problem a million times bigger.
We are getting monitored all the time, we are in an age where cameras are omnipresent. Everyone carries one in their pocket in the form of a smartphone, and countless stationary cameras are installed throughout cities.
When you walk through streets, buildings, and especially public facilities, you can see cameras almost everywhere. While it is often said that these devices exist only for security purposes and that footage is routinely deleted, this is no longer the reality. In many cases, people can request this footage through FOIA and use it as they wish, including uploading it to platforms like YouTube.
Please don’t assume the world is limited to the US. In Europe you cannot do that.
That doesn't make it right, so we should keep questioning it until it's right.
Plus side I don't think they degrade into microplastics? And aerate your soil! :D
Though water bottles is probably orders of magnitude more harmful to the planet.
If someone is doing something bad/illegal, do we have a right to record/document it? If I am outside minding my own business and not doing anything bad, do I have a right to not be recorded?
What is the difference between seeing and recalling something that happened vs recording? What happens when technology blurs the difference (for example if we all start wearing and using camera AR glasses)?
Since you can't be sure what is "bad"/illegal, and people will just record many things anyways without thinking too much about it --> then the default should be auto-expiring/auto-deletion after X hours/days, unless some reason or some confirmation is provided to justify its persistence.
For example, imagine we lived in a near-future where AI assistants were commonplace. Imagine that recording was ubiquitous but legally mandated to default into being "disappearing videos" like Snapchat, but for all the major platforms (YouTube, TikTok, X, Twitch, Kick, etc.). Imagine that every day, you as a regular person doing regular things, get maybe 10000 notifications of, "you have been recorded in video X on platform Y, do you consent for this to be persisted?", and also law enforcement has to go through a judge (kind of like a search warrant) to file things like "persistence warrants", and then maybe there is another channel/method for concerned citizens who want to persist video of a "bad guy" doing "bad things" where they can request for persistence (maybe it's like an injunction against auto-deletion until a review body can look at the request)... Obviously this would be a ton of administrative overhead, a ton of micro-decisions to be made -- which is why I mentioned the AI-assistant angle, because then I can tell my personal AI helper, "here are my preferences, here is when I consent to recording and here is when I don't... knowing my personal rules, please go and deal with the 10000 notifications I get every day, thanks". Of course if there's disagreement or lack of consensus, some rules have to be developed about how to combine different parties wishes together (e.g. take a recording of a child's soccer game, where maybe 8 parents consent and 3 parents don't to persistence... perhaps it's majority rule so persistence side wins, but then majority has to pay the cost of API tokens to a blurring/anonymization service that protects the 3 who didn't want to be persisted -- that could be a framework for handling disputed outcomes?)
I'm also purposefully ignoring the edge-case problem of, what if a bad actor wants to persist the videos anyways, but in short I think the best we can do is impose some civil legal penalties if an unwilling participant later finds out you kept their videos without permission.
Anyways, I know that's all super fanciful and unrealistic in many ways, but I think that's a compromise sort of world-building I can imagine, that retains some familiar elements of how people think about consent and legal processes, while acknowledging the reality that recording is ubiquitous and that we need sane defaults + follow-up processes to review or adjudicate disputes later (and disputes might arise for trivial things, or serious criminal matters -- a criminal won't consent to their recording being persisted, but then society needs a sane way to override that, which is what judges and warrants are meant to do in protecting rights by requiring a bar of justification to be cleared).
On the other hand: The threat of being fed into a future AI-god is real, the the downstream effects unknown.
While you may not like being recorded, the player is well within their right to do so. Just label them a "mech" and award 5 points for the take down. If you have a squad of filmers, put them all together. Your problem is now isolated to the roaming mech beast in the woods. Flank right and live out your day.
I think this is the rule that is currently under renegotiation in society. At one point you could imagine saying "I should be able to go out in public without having had a certain medical procedure (like a vaccine)." Now, I don't agree with that.
The overton window of behaviours is always shifting and not always in ways that we like.
Downside is you cannot do that in current circumstances.
I eventually accepted that being outside my home meant I gave up on my privacy. I still take it seriously in my home and online, but not in public.
I'd love to see the culture shift on this, but I won't hold my breath.
Maybe those who don't want to be filmed should be walking around with some portable LIDAR device, de facto breaking the cameras of people who don't respect their desire to not be filmed.
I have a young child - he's two and a half. Most people are considerate and ask if it's OK to take a photo - and I generally say yes if it's friends - but we were at a wedding recently and a staff member, total stranger, at the venue was laughing at him running around and asked if they could take a picture, and then got stroppy when I said no. I just think it's quite strange behaviour to want to take photos of a child you don't know. It's quite different to the professional photographer taking photos for the hosts in my mind, which you basically accept by bringing your kids to an event like that.
A mum at a playgroup just took out phone and started filming my son playing with her child. My wife asked her to stop and she again got quite stroppy, even though the group explicitly said that photos should only be taken with consent in that space!
It does yes but more like in a bad mood. A teenager who is rolling their eyes and making a comment because they’ve been asked not to do something could be described as having a strop.
For instance, one video could be filmed by a genocidal maga nutjob, and a second could be a documentary about how PLA doesn’t biodegrade, made by a woke LGBTQ+ immigrant with a working understanding of chemistry, physics and biology.
Almost 100% of the US would be upset to know they supported the production of at least one of those videos.
Not wrong, it’s rude.
Be nice to just live without needing to feel like crowd sourced surveillance all the time.
equates to
>you only have to worry about surveillance if you are doing something wrong.
This is, 100% guaranteed, a systematically injected narrative.
The author describes the sentiment nicely. I don’t like it, it feels icky but I also don’t ask people to stop. I just wish that culturally it wasn’t assumed to be ok by default
I think though, with the internet and social media came 2-3 generations that really wanted to share what was going on in their lives with other people and with that came harsh resistance to even being in the background of someone's picture.
I thought this post was going to be about not wanting to share their hobby in a blog, pictures, or video form. This is something I have struggled with, because I would like to get started with blogging and a podcast but I have held back because a lot of people are so mean and harsh with their replies and I tend to take things so personally that it really hurts and keeps me from doing it.
What's wrong with you?
Many years ago, I went to a Green Day concert where they played 21st Century breakdown for the first time. There was a large video camera on a crane above the floor. About a year later, I visited a friend and we played Green Day's (then) new Rockband game.
I noticed that Tre's dance around his drums looked awfully familiar, and then at the end of one song, the camera focused on a statue next to the stage, that I was staring at before the show. My friend didn't believe me when I told him I was in the concert they recorded to make the game.
Unfortunately, all the people in the crowd were removed and replaced with faceless stick-figure-like people. I really wish my face was in there, because it would have proved that I was there, and give me something to look for when someone else is playing the game.
> 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.
I feel the same way, but that's just not reality anymore. If you go outside your home, you're on camera. If your home faces your neighbor's door, you're probably on camera even in your own home unless you have constant obstruction of your windows and doors. I regularly see camera on apartment doors surveilling the interior of secure high-rise residential buildings. Guess you just gotta know when unit 18A takes out the trash...
Reality TV has to get consent + releases so where is the line?
I only went a few times, but it was obvious the people with the cameras were looking for interesting content and drama. I cut an open corner and ended up in the highlight reel as some example of what not to do. Even though everyone there was 50% over the speed limit and riding “dangerously” in the eyes of others, what got put on the video was the interesting stuff. And of course, you never got to see the speedo of the camera man as he went 2-3 times the limit.
Another biker I knew said he didn’t ride with those guys because they’re just out there to bait for content.
Our goal is to get the roads closed for motorbikes, place bike-repelling infrastructure and to have police involved in the many cases of one-sided accidents. For that we need to convince local governments that motorbikes are misbehaving.
So we now sift through instagram, youtube, etc to find such video's you mention where they ride "our" roads. Or where individuals that we've seen riding our roads misbehave in other places. This is obviously nothing "legal proof", but it's a growing dossier. And also a clear reason why someone may not want to be filmed. In one case, a motorbike lost control, narrowly missed a thick metal bar and plowed through two front yards of neighbors. Police was involved. We managed to find this individual on several other such videos clearly racing way over the speed limit. He lost his drivers licence. Not because of the video's, but they did help make the case this person was structurally misbehaving, not a one-time mistake or technical error.
---
Sidenote, to illustrate this is not a few "get off my lawn" people, but that this is an actual problem: These motorbikers are but a few dozen individuals over the year, yet their noise and the danger and agression towards others road users is out of any proportion. This is a quiet nature reserve where people come to run, stroll, watch birds, go swimming with family, drive grandma around, bicycle, skate, picknick. Where our kids play and where our teens cycle to school. On busy days there can be hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians in a sunny afternoon. The speed limit is mostly 30km/h (18mph), the road is 2.5 to 3m (8-9ft) wide, traffic from both sides. Motorbikers have been seen to hit 130km/h (80mph). Where children are cycling, couples are walking, fitgirls skating and so on.
Kind of like "why would you want to build a pedestrian bridge instead of just jailing the driver who hit someone at that intersection." The odds that it'll be the last time are basically zero.
We've researched this. It's a European wide issue that's discussed, researched, tested and so on, throughout many communities and places. So far, there's no way to prohibit only the bad actors.
Part of the "infrastructure" changes would be things like speed bumps. Where it pays off to ride below the speed limit, and hard to ride above it. But that then makes some misbehaving drivers use their "0-100 in 8 sec" that their motorbike builder once promised. Going through four gears on a 500m stretch. The disturbance and noise gets worse then.
It gets harder because many solutions will harm all the other legitimate usage too, or harm them worse. Speed bumps and farmers' harvesting with large tractors are terrible for our houses that then literally shake on their foundation.
If, like us, you look at "motorcycle riders" as a community, it makes sense to point at that community and say: solve the danger and disturbance that those few amongst your community clearly pose to others. Because the alternative is that we'll have to "punish" your entire community.
One of the reasons I stopped riding with this group was a few people there didn’t have a strong will to live and so adrenaline and confrontation was what they were looking for.
The specific route I mentioned though is 50km outside of the nearest city, through a wasteland and ridden at times to minimise traffic getting in the way. The best time was 6pm on a Tuesday night where you’d be lucky to pass anyone.
“Welcome to the meeting. Your voice is now being recorded and sent to a server somewhere in the world to be processed by an AI and you have zero control over it. If we were to get hacked, it will be impossible to you know if your voice will be synthesized and used to scam, abuse, or any other nefarious purposes between now and the end of time. Happy meeting!”
I’ve seriously been in meetings with 3+ AI bots from different companies I’ve never heard of.
I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.
This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.
I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.
I find these kinds of argument somewhat odd, as they imply that "this kind of thing" is some unacceptable violation of clearly pre-established rights.
Rather, one must realize that existing in society always had the implication of being visible to society, and that public spaces are just that: a place accessible to all, where if you chose to be you must also accept being observed by its other attendants.
Some physical public spaces might be crammed so full of people that it's hard to breathe, while others will have them few and far in between. Some virtual public spaces might be breaking records with their viewer counts, others will never be graced with the presence of an eyeball. Streamers just connect a physical public space with a virtual public space.
Being recorded and published in a final edit of an on-demand video is slightly different (and not implied in streaming), but that is a much older dilemma that we have had more time to adjust to and hammer out rights regarding, and few would really pay attention to someone recording on the street with anything other than slight curiosity.
So no. I believe this is the society you must accept being a member of. The only thing that has changed with time is the medium (memory and word-of-mouth, paintings, photos, video recording and finallys livestreaming), not the actions. But as important, being caught on rando streamer's camera will by default only contribute about as much to your internet fame (and loss of privacy) as going to the local grocery store.
(For those curious if age contributes to the standpoint, I'd fall in the 30-40 bucket.)
Of course Ive had video cameras in my face before at concerts but they weren't streaming and the results were probably seen by very few people. Now its instant broadcast to whoever is on the other end.
In the USA, anyone is allowed to photograph, video, or otherwise record anything they can see from a public sidewalk, subject to some soft restrictions like it being illegal to impede the movement of others. Any attempt by law enforcement or others to restrict this would likely fail in the courts.
Folks can get pretty upset by this in the real world.
But now it means archived for the whole world to see, potentially forever. 30 years from now, someone might dig it up.
So it's not so much about the photography (which as someone pointed out, might be allowed in public places), it's about posting the photos/videos into a potentially eternal public archive.
I've done this several times in various contexts. If you ask in a nice way, it usually works
If you don't ask, it's very unlikely people will have the telepathy needed to understand what you quietly want
For air-soft specifically it is also very feasible to wear a full face mask and become very hard for regular people to recognise.
Simply one of my less common hobbies has an incredibly high hit rate of gimmick social media accounts stealing videos for their own profit, with zero credit, while highly misrepresenting things. A problem not nearly unique to the hobby nor any one type of media, but a problem plaguing it nonetheless.
Its basically pushed an already obscure hobby even more so.
Hell Yes lol
I feel like the reasonable place to start is here no? Why write this whole post when this would probably be easier?
I don't think it would be. It sounds incredibly tedious in the long run.
If my kid is on some fun Disney ride, and I take a short video of them, and also there are some other people in the background or also on the ride, I would still fee comfortable sharing the video. Well, I wouldn't, because I don't put videos of my kids online, but if I was comfortable doing that, I wouldn't feel deterred by the presence of others.
But also, if someone else takes a photo of my kids in public (or at Disney), I would feel somewhat uncomfortable about it, and I'd feel even more uncomfortable about finding that photo online.
I don't know how to square that, ethically. Sometimes I see posts on Reddit that go "hey, I was out at the beach, and I saw this couple proposing, and I got this amazing photo of it, does anyone know them so I can send them a copy," and I think "you just took one of the most important, intimate, private moments of this couple's life and posted it online without their permission," but it doesn't seem to upset anyone because the couple will look really great in the photo. Does that make a difference? I've got no answers for this, just questions.
I come from a country that could be potentially affected by the Russian-Ukranian war.
A couple of years ago, the government presented a program for volunteers, consisting of a military crash-course over a weekend to get to know the basics. Military service is voluntary in my country, so I thought it might actually be a good idea to have had a rifle in my hand at least once. You never know.
So I decided to sign up and got a few documents to sign. One of them was explicit consent for the organizing party to use any pictures taken during the training in order to use it as promotional material. No opt-out possible.
You understand? They could take pictures of me during a voluntary training, and post them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet!
I even sent them an email asking to clarify and if I could opt out. They refused and would not allow me to participate if I didn't accept.
They asked for consent before filming.
You disagreed and didn't participate.
They didn't record you and didn't publish video of you.
This bothers me. The default should be not including people, and instead offer lanyards (or whatever) who want to be included.
I know why it doesn’t work that way, though.
https://www.prigge-recht.de/filmen-im-oeffentlichen-raum-was...
> 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.
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Well, here is the heart of the disagreement. I suspect everyone agrees that the social norms are "clear," they just vehemently disagree about what those norms are.
I don't know anything specific about the implicit cultural norms of airsoft, but it sounds like the author is playing at a privately owned facility which I would expect to have very explicit rules and liability waivers. I'd be surprised if those rules don't cover photography.
Why?
I dont ask this dismissively. Im not suggesting he's unjustified. That's just the interesting question to me and the author doesnt explore it. I believe this feeling is a new trend.
I dont think people had these qualms, say, 20 years ago. The world was a very different place back then. At the end of the day I suppose it's because 20 years ago, even with a totally permissive policy, you'd never expect footage of you to reach any significant amount of people. It would rarely happen and when it did there wouldnt be a huge audience to share it with.
But does it go beyond that? Would people have cared even if it did reach a wide audience? Is it possible people seek more privacy and control over their image than before? And not just as a reaction to how global everything is because of the internet? Gen Z being afraid of answering phone calls, etc.
This strikes me as similar to the attitude towards phone number privacy. People used to publicly share their phone numbers by default. You were included in the phone book unless you specially requested not to be. Now it feels invasive for parties to ask you for it, even when they have some plausible reason.
Awareness and prevalence of dragnets, AI, surveillance economy.
1- ubiquity: now, virtually everyone's got a device capable of capturing high quality photo/video of you at any time
2- discoverability: social media gives anything the potential to go viral which might put you in the spotlight or limelight, and the frequency at which things can go viral "enough" is way higher (more platforms, larger follower counts, etc) (this is I assume what you meant by "reach")
3- "content creators" are everywhere: people want to turn anything into something, through all kinds of incentives that were unavailable 20 years ago, so it's a much more active "capture and use it" context
Things just aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
i feel like there is also the fact that those people now have more tools to trace the video back to you personally. Like they could potentially take some action that impacts your life. Probably not a concern with being a masked person in an airsoft game though.
Major cloud compute and OS infra providers should provide a global opt-out of public bystander-recording. OK, record me, but it will be known by my face, location stamps from my device, etc, that it's me, and post-processing will anonymize me.
Legitimate public interest? EG, I stole your car and it's on tape? Sure, provide the cloud provider with a warrant for 'originals'.
One often mentioned reason is the fear that in some way your likeness will end up in something significant, or viral. That makes sense, it's the most invasive and significant violation. We "risk becoming the side character in someone else's parasocial relationship" as another commentator mentioned. I myself wouldn't want that either, but I derive some comfort from one main observation: virality doesn't scale. A lot of the worries come from the fact that "everyone is filming now", "everything is shared now". That's true, but the likelihood of any of this ever becoming popular or even seen goes down as the volume goes up. That alone is enough for me to not be that worried, at least not by the increased prevalence of public filming/photography.
On the other hand, this does nothing to limit the effect of data harvesting and government espionage, a real worry I might have.
The common-law tort of invasion of privacy grows to encompass new situations only through court cases.
Courts (i.e., judges) are not looking to create rules out of thin air, but look to reflect when expectations have changed in a way that tracks the principles behind the tort.
In this case, an initial historical period of permitting publication by default can be followed by a restrictive period of prohibiting invasions, based on the recognizing dangers from publication, e.g., permanent and lasting damage to one's business relationships through disclosing of embarrassing but irrelevant images.
To make law you have to get out of the realm of personal feelings and start expressing principles for the way people should live together.
For instance, in my area we’ve recently had a couple Nazi demonstrations. People with swastika flags and “Hitler was right” signs. I’d like that to go away.
But to attempt to use law to do anything about it would mean allowing someone to choose what others can and cannot say in public. That’s worse, or at least at some point it will be.
This is very much like that (though of course far less nefarious) and you just have to let people take paintball videos. Imagine if we didn’t let people video anything they want in public. How many instances of police brutality would go unpunished. That’s worse.
My advice: start a paintball league and make that the rule. And yeah, it does suck to have to suddenly become an event planner just to not end up on YouTube but welcome to the future I guess.
Commercial use in most jurisdictions is handled differently from the “free speech” exception. There are generous carve outs for art though. Which is interesting. If I sell a photograph it’s art but if I sell it to an ad agency for use on a billboard it’s commerce?
But the world we live in is so changed, it is a very recent change where taking a photograph was almost always a 1:1 photo to print ratio. It’s very new the idea that everyone is carrying around an internet connected video camera that can publish live to billions of people. This absolutely changes the calculus and laws should be updated accordingly.
I don’t know what that should look like but it seems we should acknowledge that this activity is primarily commercial (clout is marketing and/or brand value a/k/a goodwill in accounting parlance) and that laws intended to protect art making maybe don’t / shouldn’t protect this form of commerce as much as they seem to presently.
To be clear: if you are in public and someone takes a recognizable photo of you eg your face and uses it to sell perfume congratulations on being beautiful and also call a lawyer because that use is not protected just because you were in a public space.
But you can make a print hang it in a gallery and sell it for whatever price you want. (AFAIK). Maybe there’s more nuance— could you put it in a book of your work and sell it? On the cover? Make postcards? NFT’s (remember those?) etc.
Anyway there are already limits and we should maybe enforce the ones that we have in some of these circumstances. I wonder if it’s already happening- I can’t be the first person to view this activity as commercial right? There must already be precedent somewhere.
Just like how every YouTube gear review says “company X sent me this but they have no say and no money changed hands” is pretending it’s not a sponsored video. It’s absolutely a sponsored video. 1. You are paid for views 2. People watch reviews on “release day” aka embargo day 3. If you get the product later you will have less views and less money, and you will miss the window of product hype cycle.
So just like every not sponsored review video is absolutely sponsored live-streaming a kids birthday or whatever is commercial and you need model releases. I guess these people will have to post notice of filming warnings at the door along with the balloons.
There's face recognition. There's gait recognition. There's inference of the likely participants from cell phone data and known movement patterns. Some of this is probabilistic but still useful. Even if the matching wasn't done at the time, it can be done later.
Perhaps it is a generational gap, but the idea that I have to justify NOT attempting to squeeze a hustle out of absolutely everything I do reduces my trust in any content generated in [current year] as nothing more but a carefully crafted advertising space.
But I don’t really care, for one because the stakes are lower when it’s fully online behind a mostly anonymous account, but also because I am confident if anyone was actually watching a streamer in my game I would find out about it.
If the YouTuber at your local field was raking in views, you would probably know about it, and could you try to resolve it with them. Otherwise these videos are probably not being seen by anyone but their recorder.
I actually feel the same, I don't really mind if I'm at the gym and in the back of a video someone's taking of themselves to review later to take notes on their form. I actually do kind of care if it gets posted to YouTube and now 100,000 people have seen me covered in sweat or struggling with something or whatever. It's something that's technically 'illegal' in a private space here in the UK, so why do we all just accept/allow it anyway? YouTube or Instagram could easily work out if the video was taken indoors and show a 'are you sure' message.
Just a thought. It's not that big a deal, of course, though to some people it might be (for good reasons).
sounds like an environmental nightmare
Go to a restaurant with friends or family for dinner - someone has to request the waiter to take a photo of all our faces stuffed with food, can't even have a meal without modeling for stupid photos.
Go to any event - we have to take photos, we have to pose for photos. Back when meetup.com was a thing, every event people were more interested in taking photos than having meaningful conversations.
Go to any tourist place - flashes everywhere, photos everywhere. I used to live in Manhattan, you can't walk 10 feet without some tourist group posing for photos. You have grit your teeth and wait for their photo session to finish, or feel bad for interrupting it.
Couple of years ago (I forgot exactly when) I noticed the self checkout kiosks at WholeFoods had video cameras. I can't even buy half a pound of tomatoes without being on someone's camera/database. As if WholeFoods is some top secret nuclear facility...What crime am I gonna commit there? Steal onions?
And on and on and on...
Who even looks at these stupid photos anyway? Do we really need to document what we ate for breakfast along with our faces, as if we ate some exotic fruit that is only available once every 25 years? It is the same shitty toast and crappy coffee
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.
This makes perfect sense. I don't want to take anyone's photo (even those people I know very well, like family and friends) without their consent. Same way, I don't want anyone taking my photo either, and most certainly don't want anyone posting them online where it is gonna stay there forever.
We are just plain stupid, as a society
Is it what it sounds like? As in plastic sprayed in to the ground?
Collected? How?
“Burning Man’s number one rule of etiquette for photography is Ask First — you should get permission before taking somebody’s photo.”
https://burningman.org/about/about-us/press-media/photo-guid...
Just because you possess a device that records images doesn't automatically give you the right to record/post/upload images of me without my express consent.
maxehmookau•4mo 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•4mo 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•4mo ago
But I'm also free to apply societal pressure to behave like a grown-up.
mapontosevenths•4mo 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•4mo 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•4mo 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.
maxehmookau•4mo ago
First, and arguably most important, thing in learned in tech & business. Once the contracts come out, it's game over.
BolexNOLA•4mo ago