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Comment by mondoshawan | Hacker News Reader

Someone else's private photos. Taken on a stolen iPod. Using stolen credentials.

I fail to see how these photos are private.

Two wrongs don't make a right?

You act as though you could apply some simple legal test to this essentially ethical question. I think it's very hard to make an ethical case for sharing photos someone made (with an extremely high likelihood of) not knowing they would be public for entertainment purposes.

Private photos are private photos, even if made by a thief and they don't suddenly become public because the thief accidentally shares them with someone. When I accidentally share photos with someone I sure hope they would tell me about it and not share them with the world.

The author openly acknowledges they left the phone behind by mistake in a position where they weren't able to attempt to retrieve it, and we have absolutely no reason to assume any ill-intent on the part of the teenage monk that appeared to have started using it weeks later.

(Though, that said, I suspect that monk in question would be unlikely to be especially upset to find the photos online, having quite happily posed for plenty of photos with falangs who presumably had their own cameras anyway.)

I aggre, the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer.

The monk has a number of options:

1. Reset the iPod(which he cant do cause it requires an appleId password),

2. Dont take pictures with the Ipod.

3. Disable icloud sync.(i think one can do that with out authentication)

4. Dont use the Ipod.

5. Use it and share the pictures.

He has clearly "chosen" nr 5.

I know this is controversial but in my mind if you fuck up it is up to you to "fix" it. It's capitalism.

My ethical view on this is that in general (but not always) you need explicit consent before you publish the photograph of someone. Just having access to the photos (in this case it’s probably still the monk who has the copyright to those photos, but that’s a trickier question, but certainly also another potential angle to look at this) or even having copyright to the photos is not enough.

That’s also not an altogether uncommon view. In Germany it’s codified into law, for example.

There should obviously be exceptions to this and some are really easy to come up with (political events or demonstrations or all kinds of public events in general), with others it gets trickier, but most if not all of the monk’s photos shouldn’t be exceptions.

Also, many of those photos have more people than the monk in them, so it’s not like you could frame this as some sort of punishment of a thief. The other people are just as affected!

"the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer"

Even if you accept that, it doesn't mean it's not a dick move to share the photos on the internet.

Think about the photos you've shared with friends. Would you be happy if all of them were made available to everyone in the world?

It wasn't stolen, it was lost and found. [1]

And for the credentials part, you're assuming a certain amount of technical knowledge and interest for iPod features beyond the basics.

[1] Relevant, from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10247974

Reply on news.ycombinator.com