Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman’s Statement Confirms the Worst

No need to do silly or embarrassing things - an "amusing" voice over commentary will be enough to bury you.

It gets rather bothersome. My professional life at least is pretty public and it's sort of my job. But I'm pretty happy that there weren't ubiquitous cameras and videos around when I was younger.

In practice, most of us are somewhat protected by sheer numbers and the fact that people move on and a lot of information does effectively rot over time.

Balanced against that though is the increasingly number of cameras and automated recognition and categorization systems. And the whole mob mentality. Obviously in the cases where it has actually led to deaths. But also in the, perhaps rare, but well-documented cases where a stupid off-hand remark or action triggers the social media machine and the path of least resistance is career-ending firings and the like.

Telling a few friends used to be the default, and telling everybody took more effort. Now the default is for people to share their comments with ~2 billion people. It's actually more work to tell only your friends.

If this only went on on Twitter or whatever, this would have come to pass. The reason it's "blown up" is due to media attention, ironically from the likes of The Atlantic and all the other media channels who decided it was funny and wanted to carry the story because everyone else was.

The Atlantic should be outraged at itself along with all the media family.

Right here The Atlantic is masterfully playing the issue from both sides. It could have addressed the issue genetically, of course.

What gets me about this is how you can be as scrupulous and disciplined as you please about staying off social media, wiping up your digital footprints, etc., but then as soon as you go out in public, someone can just blithely make the decision for you, to put you on social media.

To say nothing of all the proliferating random stationary surveillance cameras and police bodycams out there. Which if you're "fortunate" enough to live in Orlando FL or Washington County OR, is now connected to a facial recognition ML model.

Where is the backlash, where is the outrage about this? Why do people just stupidly let dumb shit proliferate, and only years later say "Oops we did it again?"

>Somehow, after all of this, fans of the thread still remained adamant that no wrong had been committed. “We do it everyday to celebrities. No difference. Outrage culture is so dumb,” wrote one Instagram user below a BuzzFeed News post on the story.

It does seem no different from what society seems to be ok with towards celebrities. I have always been uncomfortable with the idea that because someone is on a TV show, society is ok having photographers follow them around 24/7 and reporting on their personal lives.

We have set a poor precedent.

"Orville", a semi-serious version of Star Trek by Seth MacFarlane has one amusing "Black Mirror"-ultra-lite episode about this: "Majority Rule". In this world, law has been replaced by a simple upvote/downvote system and pictures of people doing stupid things can go viral on a "global feed".

There's no need to lay the blame at 'culture' and 'society'. The problem is that you only need a thousand assholes in the million that read your story to cause major problems. Even in the most amazing culture and society you may expect 1 in a 1000 to be an asshole.

I think most humans are reasonable people. Many are even great people, no matter how much you may disagree with them about many small things. The problem is just the 1 asshole in a 1000 that has an outsized influence.

No - not a good deed, but very educational.

It depends on the jurisdiction (2 party consent vs. 1 party, etc.). It depends if there was an "expectation of privacy." It depends if the image or video is being used for a commercial purpose like advertising. [ADDED: I'm mostly discussing the US here.]

This case is probably questionable but, to your point, if I take a picture of you canoodling in a public park I'm perfectly within my rights to publish that image so long as it's not for marketing or advertising purposes (if people are recognizable).

I’ve seen similar interactions where people seem to think they have a lot more power over their image than they do legally, or certainly seem like, to me, ethical should have.

I was in a local public street market and I was trying to take a picture of an o next sitting on a vendor’s table (not sure if it was a lamp, sculpture, or something else).

The guy became very irate, came out from behind the table, started yelling, bumped his chest to mine, and said I couldn’t take a picture and that I had to leave or he would call “management” and “the police.”

It was very odd and interesting because he’s set up in a public place. He wasn’t really up for discussion, but when I said that it was legal to take pictures of public spaces he said that he didn’t want me to and if I didn’t respect his wishes I had to leave. I was standing in the street where his table was set up, so it was doubly odd.

Legally, in the US, it’s fine to take photos in public spaces (and usually even sell them) [0] but I can’t find opinion poll data to see if it’s common for people to think this should be restricted.

I try to think of how this will play out given trends in tech and transhumanism. Eventually we’ll likely have total clarity archives of everything we experience. How do we balance people’s freedom to their own senses vs people’s preferences?

I think we’re covered with current laws to prevent illegal acts done with the photos (fraud, harassment, etc). But not sure what we should do to stop photos or help people not care about photos.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...

Maybe we should think about fact that celebrities are people too more often.

Even still, isn't it ok for celebrities not to want to share every detail of their life?

> celebrities choose to put themselves in the spotlight.

It does not follow that e.g. if your day job is singing or acting, that you want people to interrupt you and take photos when you are eating in a restaurant, or discuss your relationships in a tabloid. Many would view it as an unfortunate side-effect of the job, or worse.

And that's why I think it's immoral for parents to put their kids into the entertainment industry. Even if the industry wasn't exploitative the kid has no understanding of what they're giving up and whether it's more important than money.

Fame used to be something you had to ask for, because being famous required access to limited infrastructure. Media access was scarce, and so you had to work to be noticed by the gatekeepers of that infrastructure.

Digital communication an internetworking fundamentally changed that; the cost to publish dropped to approximately zero. Basic media access is de facto no longer scarce. You no longer need to appeal to a gatekeeper when you can e.g. post a tweet for free.

This means it it now possible to accidentally reach a much larger audience than the most of the pre-internet media. Fame is now something that can happen to you. Worse, the traditional idea of fame was something you could walk away form. You simply quit participating; being some type of celebrity was a job that required maintenance. When you become accidentally famous on Twitter/etc it is often your normal life that happened to become famous. Walking away form that means walking away from your normal life.

For a very good explanation of this topic, I recommend this[1] video.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

Further isolating ourselves would hurt in other areas. As someone else said, we need a cultural change, one where we need not to have to constantly distrust other people because they respect boundaries. One of the best ways to do this would be to reduce the amount of value stupid internet popularity points seem to matter and push dopamine buttons.

It's the opposite, be as public as much as you can. If your life already mostly public, the incident like this likely won't hurt you much.

Lower risk, I'd think, than now. There's only room for a few concurrent big memes on the internet, and the risk of becoming one of those is split among all of the people exposed to it. AI generating an increased flood of it would just increase the noise.

consent to record someone is a thing. Some states are only one party consent, some require both.

That's absolutely right. This was clearly obnoxious on the part of at least a couple people as well as the "mob." And it may have violated some clandestine recording statute depending on what jurisdiction it took place in. But I can't feel that the solution is some sort of right to be forgotten on steroids where anyone can get media that don't like for any reason to be taken down across social media and search. (Probably not practical anyway even if people were OK with that--which they wouldn't be.)

I participated in solving it the best way I know how, by doing my best to ignore it completely. I highly encourage others to do the same.

There may be a technical solution on Twitter's end — adjust their feed algorithm. I feel like their shift towards algorithmically ranking the Twitter feed (versus chronologically) has dramatically increased the reach of viral moments like this.

They're trying to maximize user engagement/addiction and it's working. But what cost is their algorithm imposing on society? We're seeing more outrage in politics, more clickbait in journalism, and more privacy violations like this. Engagement-obsessed algorithms have created massive externalities which we all pay for.

I’ve suggested a fix before - once you follow or get more than a certain number of followers, say 15, there should be a fee to tweet, and a much higher one to retweet.

> She was made famous by somebody else without her knowledge and consent.

She was made famous by the attention-seeking couple, her "plane boyfriend" and the exploitive media.

It's amazing how such a nonstory was milked by everyone for publicity and profit. And the theatlantic is still going at it.

If the poor woman wants privacy, how about theatlantic stop writig about the "Plane-Bae Woman"? How about focus on the couple who "set her up" to gain media following? How about focus on the "plane boyfriend" who knew about the couple filming them and used that for publicity by appearing all over TV and hinting that the unsuspecting woman had sex with him in the plane bathroom ( probably because the producer told him they needed juicy story from him ).

Or most importantly, how about the atlantic shine a light on itself and the media which turn a non-story into a major story because they need to exploit everything and everyone for money?

The story should be on everyone but the woman and yet the title is "Plane-Bae Woman".

And the atlantic is lying when they say "unidentified" woman when the "boyfriend" identified her and the media spent an entire week exploiting this woman and this story.

Instead of "Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman...", how about "Everything Wrong with the Media and Attention Seeking People"? Put the focus on the problem, not the victim.

There's no reason existing media release forms wouldn't work in this instance.

They can use violence too. And since you okayed, it. They're justified in posting pictures of you lying bloodied in the street, saying karma's a bitch.

Great point. When did you last have sex and with who? Can you post your picture and theirs for us?

...posts the anonymized account.

You don't really think that's a solution. You just want it to be a solution for everyone else.

OK – you first! Everything you do or say in public will now be documented and that documentation easily searchable under your real name. Have a nice day!

There’s a serious problem when the degree of attention becomes asymmetrical. Many more people can focus on you than you can focus on in return, and flood every line of communication you have (digital or in real life) with hateful or harassing messages. Our infrastructure isn’t built for this; you can’t sort through emails or texts fast enough to eliminate the unsolicited ones, your voicemail will run out of space, and your ability to walk to the store may become literally impossible when a mob of people surround you. We are also not built psychologically to be okay having to monitor literally millions of potential threats or allies. There is a reason celebrities have to hire people whose sole job it is to protect them from this sort of harassment, and those are people who have already opted out of privacy.

> Against whom?

Against the woman who posted the Tweets, I would imagine? Perhaps also against the companies which encouraged it, like T-Mobile?