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Comment by callesgg | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking for a lifeloging camera for a while. But i can't find anything that is discrete enogh. The n"arative clip" looked discrete. But it is of the market.

Just want something that takes picture every 20 min's or so. So that i can review/analyze some of my daily behaviors in hindsight.

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I got a narrative pretty early on, it's not bad but unfortunately in the last year the battery life has absolutely tanked on it, lasting only 2 hours max at this point, and as this the custom today, completely non-removable.

Have you perhaps considered that recording people unobtrusively without their consent may be unethical or, at the minimum, rude?

And depending on where you are in the world: illegal.

At least in the US, you can record anything you want in public. There are some limits for things you see on private property from a public area (like using a telephoto lens for snapping pics of someone's bedroom) but if someone is in public, they have no right to privacy.

That's (fortunately) not the case everywhere: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...

194 out of 195 countries in the world aren't the United States of America and 7.4 billion people out of 7.7 billion live outside of the US.

You might want to add that video, without the audio to this - as audio recording issues vary state by state and by different situations / parameters, public or not.

There could be other issues to mention such as someone being topless behind a fence is expecting a certain amount of privacy, even if it's easy for you to see because you are on the second floor nearby, and things like that.

There are other sensitive areas that are posted prohibited as well.

Some of these things have not been to court in various areas or circumstances to really see how "right to photograph" applies in various places / different people.

Certainly one might expect that people on public payroll in a public place should expect certain transparency in actions, however upskirt filming marilyn manson in line at a burger king may lend to some issues (civil and criminal in some juristictions).

I think some also have 'rights to their likeness" in various ways and copyright issues as well. Paparazzi may have lawyers who are willing to make it expensive to debate some issues, however filming a phish concert or other performance from a hill and sharing the video on social media is likely to raise a different team of lawyers who would be happy to have such a debate in courts.

So, there may be certain established freedoms to record many things in the US in many places, with some case law to back it up, I don't think it's good advice to say "you can record anything you want in public" and have people not be aware of a multitude of issues that could arise.

I believe private property owners can even sue if you use their barn in a photo in some cases.

However I must admit it's been more than a decade since I really looked into these things, and have only skimmed some articles relating to this issue in the past few years, mostly to do with filming public employees, so definitely not legal advice or anything, etc.

If you are in public, you have no right to privacy. Anyone can record you. You don't have to be overtly recording all of your interactions but there is nothing unethical about recording everything you see in public.

   If you are in public, you have no right to privacy.

It is worth remembering this is dependent on the jurisdiction you are in.

..and if audio is being recorded, and several other possible issues. I just posted a few of the ones of the top of my head in other section of this discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18514586

There's nothing illegal about it, but depending on how you go about it, there may be plenty that's unethical about it.

For me the interesting philosophical question is how different is it to see things with out eyes and remember them vs. recording with a device? For the most part, the fidelity and the transmittability are the main issues. If, hypothetically, someone invented a system that would allow a computer to adaptively display images to a human and accept semi-conscious feedback with the intent of reconstructing a relatively high-fidelity image from human memory, would such a system be illegal or equivalent to using a recording device?

Similarly, would it be possible to reduce the fidelity or persistence of the recording device to the point where it wouldn't violate any ethical or social conventions? Some sort of "bad camera" that deliberately produces abstract representations of what is photographed or downsamples in such a way that forging the images becomes so easy that nobody would accept this sort of evidence in a court of law or even in more casual circumstances?

I have, and it is not that I want to view other people it is that I want to see what I do. Our brains are not good at saving the type of mondane day to day activitys that make up most of our days.

It is for my own consumption. So while I don't think it is unethical I am sure that some people will react negatively. Which is why is has to be discrete, also I don't want to think about the camera at all, that would negate it's purpose.

Its purpose is to give me objective information about my own life. Something that my brain can't serve me, it only gives subjective info.

There is also a diffrerance between video and audio and a snapshot every 20 minutes.

It kind of ticks me off that people lose their collective "sh##" when things like Google Glass and Narrative help to give power to the civilian to record things in an unobtrusive manner but that people are totally fine with the ubiquitous billions of eye-in-the-sky surveillance cameras (see London) that the government uses to watch us every second.

> ticks me off that people lose their collective shit when things like Google Glass [record ubiquitously but] people are totally fine with the ubiquitous billions of eye-in-the-sky surveillance cameras

The overlap between the “people” who don’t like Google to record their lives and the “people” who don’t care if the police do it is quite small...

But in any case the police in a democracy are at least nominally accountable to the populace, and can be checked via elections and other mechanisms. The mission of police is ostensibly for public benefit and includes criminal investigation, which surveillance could arguably help with. Google is a multinational corporation accountable primarily to itself which wants the data to help with its advertising business.

I appreciate the response, and I'm not trying to be sarcastic but the operative word here is "nominally". While it's nice in theory to view law enforcement and the government as some kind of trustworthy body whose purpose is to serve and protect, in reality that kind of power is often abused.

Look how long it took for bodycams on police to be used and even then, they get conveniently broken, battery dies, or just blatently turned off.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? and all that.

The cameras in London are mostly private.

Do you live in a country where smartphones don't exist and nobody uses them? I regularly notice people outside taking photos/videos with their phones (or digital camera) where unsuspecting individuals are in the background. I have made it a habit to try and ruin these people's pictures when I'm in the shot by making ugly faces/hand signs.

Relatedly, in Austria there was a court case several years ago where somebody sued a photographer for taking his picture in public, arguing that it was making fun of his character (Belustigung) and to everyone's surprise, he won the case.

you mean, like they do in almost every single retail establishment you enter? Or do you mean like on the streets?

do you realize that your statement also implies it's "rude" and "unethical" to take a photo in a public place if there's anyone in the frame you didn't ask permission of?

Modern society has very much accepted that recording people unobtrusively without their consent is 100% ok. Not only does no-one refuse to go into an establishment that may record them without their consent, no-one gets upset when you take a selfie in public and capture the people behind you, or when you take a picture in a public park (or whatever) with many people in it.

The problem, and I speak from experience here, is when you actually make people actively aware of the fact that a person they know is taking pictures that include them when they're not paying attention to the camera.

Most people do not care that faceless entities are taking their photos and video of them without their consent. If they did, they wouldn't keep allowing their legislators to pass laws allowing this practice.

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