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Comment by jswrenn | Hacker News Reader

This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video, but I can't justify that feeling. There's something so wonderfully disobedient about neutralizing cameras with lasers that I'm tempted to ask: is this legal? Does the potential for damaging the camera carry any liability?

Lastly, just because you could use lasers to neutralize cameras doesn't mean you can. In trying to to make a point about the ubiquity of cameras, the author reveals a challenge in fighting them:

> Video cameras the size of postage stamps can be procured for under $100, and will certainly become even smaller and cheaper.

Blocking cameras is one thing; finding them is another!

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> This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video

On this note I've been thinking about whether there's anything actually offensive about capturing video in a public location. You're just capturing photons thrown at you. If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).

The human eye is a camera; the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition. One is made of organic material, another made of silicon and glass. In the future, I see this boundary blurring, whether in the form of digital prosthetic eyes for the blind (which inevitably would possess the hardware ability to capture video to a file) or in being able to understand, capture, and save neural signals out of our biological eyes directly. It will happen and is just a matter of time. So we might as well create a unified ethical framework now, built around the fact that the human eye is a camera; the act of seeing is videography; the act of remembering is data storage.

> they shouldn't be in a public place...

I beg your pardon?

Privacy is conceptually incompatible with public places.

If one doesn't want that the fact they've been at some public location, doing something, they shouldn't be there. Forcing bystanding observers to not remember or not disclose the facts they have observed is somewhat odd idea.

There is a huge difference between eye witness memory or elaboration and recording audio or video.

Indeed: eyewitness accounts are notoriously inaccurate, whereas video can be replayed.

Which is a good thing about videos. Objective reality > subjective reality.

My point is, this difference/gap may be closed in the future by technology, so inaccuracy of eyewitness memory shouldn't be used as a basis for ethical justification.

Today, yes. Today recording means we're still taking a camera and do some actions.

But love it or hate it, but it seems that we're grasping wearable computing. And that includes stuff like hearing, vision, memory or navigational aids, and such things depend on recording what's going on around the wearer. So, while today there's a clear distinction we're just bound to hit the issue some years in the future. And given that some tech is already there, said future doesn't seem to be too far away. Then the difference would be much smaller. Probably even non-existent if we'd get anywhere close to what transhumanistic sci-fi pictures ;)

And this means a war between concepts - freedom to absorb and process information, and freedom to control your personal information.

I'm not sure there is any objective approach for ethical problems, so, I guess, it would be just a matter of taste, chance and circumstances.

That's what laws and regulation are for. When people don't know how to handle tools (in this case, tech) properly.

It is unreasonable to expect to not be observed in a public place, but it is reasonable to expect to not be recorded artificially without your knowledge. This goes for all locations, including public ones.

No, it's not. You've probably been photographed or filmed at least once on your way to work today by an innocent tourist or citizen who was shooting something. A building, or a friend perhaps. It seems unreasonable to expect you won't be featured on such photos.

Yes, it is. I can observe innocent tourists and citizens taking photos and avoid them if I want to. The key part you missed was "without my knowledge." I'm not going to obsess over being in the background of the occasional tourist photo, but if I want to avoid it, I can by simply observing the obvious camera and avoiding it. I could even discuss it with them if I really cared for some reason, and possibly have them delete a photo of me.

I am aware of tourist photos and photos by friends. It is reasonable to expect that I'll be in occasional photographs where I am not the subject. I know that. It is reasonable to expect that I won't be the subject of photos without my knowledge or included in detailed photographic records just because I went to a public place. Detailed imagery of your whereabouts and activities should never be expected and should only be legal with a warrant.

There is a conceptual difference between granting permission for everyone who sees you at a time to see you and know you were somewhere and granting permission for everyone in a place to make images of you and share them with everyone else in the world for all time.

I think that this is especially pertinent for children who are not able to make the decision to grant these rights, the permission for a photograph or video cannot be rescinded on majority, but the person could make different decisions about where they go, what they wear and how they behave, with limited responsibility for the prior decision to do something else.

Following your argument, it seems like there's nothing wrong with throwing a few more photons out (albeit in a coherent beam).

As a thought experiment, imagine three masks. The first is matte black, with 0% specular and 0% diffuse reflection. The second has a mirror finish, with 100% specular reflection. The third glows, as an omnidirectional light source.

Would it be acceptable for a person in public to wear one of these, but not one of the others?

My sense is that if you want privacy in public, you should wear the matte black mask.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws You might not be able to.

> the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition

There's a huge difference: With a camera, you can record the photons and share them. The barrier to entry for privacy violation and harassment has via "captured photons" has never been lower.

This comment reminds me super strongly of the Black Mirror episode on humans having memory recording devices turning their every experience into a recorded session to be replayed and analysed at will.

It's very well done and wonderfully dystopic. Soon™

I remember that episode; Black Mirror is a really good, thought-provoking series. As for this particular case, I believe we'll simply adapt. You could weave a pretty much identical dystopia 20 years ago about smartphones of today, but it turns out we're fine, and we're enriched as a society (despite what the anti-technology whiners will tell you).

> The human eye is a camera; the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition.

I think that another important difference is that Canon-recorded images can be stored, archived, and consulted indefinitely, and by anyone, whereas human-recorded images cannot.

My point is, this difference/gap may be closed in the future by technology, so inaccuracy of eyewitness memory shouldn't be used as a basis for ethical justification. In 50 years we may be able to store images from the human eye, and/or use prosthetic eyes that fix blindness and serve both biological and digital functions at the same time.

If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).

That would be a perfectly reasonable position if there weren't laws against blocking photons. (Mask bans)

> If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).

That is true when it comes to merely being seen, but not being recorded. Being in a public location naturally implies consent to be seen, but it does not imply consent to be recorded artificially. (This includes any augmentations to human abilities from future technology, as someone mentioned this in a later comment)

>This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video

This idea is shifting though, we've steadily been leaving behind a place of having cameras predominantly being used to prevent theft, towards a situation of mass government surveillance on the street level (think license plate scanners etc). To me personally, that is more offensive at this point.

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