How can you have privacy concerns in a completely public space?
Deployed since 2004 to look for camcorders.[1] Disney tried out technology for recording audience engagement in a theater in 2017. [2][3] "We instrumented a 400 seat movie theater using four infra-red (IR) cameras and four IR illuminators placed above the projection screen. The cameras were outfitted with IR bandpass filters to remove the spill of visible light that reflected off the movie screen. The video was recorded at 12 frames per second with a resolution of 2750×2200 pixels. The resolution of faces ranged from 15×25 (back rows) to 40×55 (front rows). We collected over 150 viewings of 9 mainstream movies released in 2015 and 2016". They show graphs for laughing and smiling over time for Inside Out. So it works. Coming soon to a theater near you, probably.
Cinemark installed intensive surveillance of the concession stand.[4] That's where the money is made. "The concessions people could look through every kids’ combo that was sold across a region and see whether they are actually attracting children or if they are trading down college-aged women who would’ve bought a larger size of all of those items if you didn’t have that meal option for them."
[1] http://www.pirateeye.com/pirateeye/technology/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171116222427/https://www.disne...
[3] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/disneyresearch/wp-content...
[4] http://www.filmjournal.com/content/envysion-better-business-...
If I'm in an airline, I should have some say if there's going to be a camera facing me the ... entire ... flight. That goes beyond just the casual picture or video capture.
If their commercial purpose was internal to the company then a release wouldn't be required.
I'm an American. This likely isn't true in other countries with more stringent privacy laws.
In the USA, it depends on jurisdiction and the circumstances. For example, CA is a "two-party consent" state, meaning that to record another party requires their knowledge and consent in some circumstances. This case (a camera in the back of an airline seat) is a bit on the line: the space isn't terribly private (it's a row of seats on an airline), yet a private conversation might be had in a low voice between two people, who did not see, or do not recognize, and were not told that there is a camera pointed right at them.
I do not know if this is a violation of two-party consent. It might not be.
IANAL, but AFAIK one/two party consent only applies to private conversations (eg. phone calls). Public conversations are fair game in all jurisdictions.
That is an entirely realistic scenario, patents have been granted for this already. Regardless of an expectation of privacy it is potentially a terrible UX as well.
I mean, yeah, it's conceivable that someone could try that. It is also conceivable that it would fail miserably.
If you turn down your volume too much on your phone, it pauses the advert and demands to raise volume to continue.
Unlike "completely public spaces", it's not free to be on an airplane. You can vote with your wallet in this situation.
Since members of the general public are in close proximity I generally wouldn't consider an airplane cabin a place where I could have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
In places that are intentionally restricted from view by others, like my own home, a hotel room, etc. I'd have an expectation of privacy.
If I'm going to, say, a concert, or especially a taping of a TV show, I have a much higher expectation of ending up in some video footage. But people often sleep on planes. They're not expecting to be recorded.
Privacy is something I control by not exposing sensitive information in areas where recording is a possibility.
I already take precautions when flying by not working on my laptop or having sensitive conversations with family or coworkers.
I generally don't consider information on where my gaze is looking, facial expressions, or if I'm awake or asleep sensitive information unless I'm in a private space like my home, a hotel room, or a bathroom.
I'm not sure if they'd be able to extend that to someone recording me although it likely varies by country. I think British law considers continued recording a form of harassment where the same protections don't exist in America.
If I was really really bothered by it for some reason I might raise it once. The cabin crew has the safety of the flight and other responsibilities to be concerned with.
But aside from that, I'd posit that it's actually a very different thing to have a random passenger recording you (which is still gross) and the airline (which may be owned and operated by a foreign government, which is the case for most of the airlines in the Middle East and some in Asia), which has your name, your passport number, your birthdate, your address, and other very sensitive and identifying information on file.
One is creepy and uncool. The other could be flat-out surveillance. Especially since when you travel, the government data you give to the airlines isn't negotiable (meaning unless I'm flying domestic, I can't use a fake ID and name to travel (and even that would be against the law), I have to use my passport, my full name, my address, etc.
The problem is that this attitude will ultimately mean that the only place where you might have any chance of privacy is in your own home. And even there, privacy is getting more and more rare.
I fly a lot for work (I'm already at 67k miles flown for 2019 -- that's actual miles not airline miles (so that 67k is lower than my status miles)) and for anything over 6 hours or so, I fly business (unless I get an upgrade on a short-haul) and have had 6 flights over 10 hours this year, where I tend to have a lay flat bed and attempt to sleep. So I DO sleep on flights. Quite a bit (my flight to/from Australia was great, largely because I slept 9 of the 14 hours the first leg and 7 of the 13 hours the second).
I'd be just as freaked out if someone was recording me sleeping on an airplane in a ticket I paid $10k for as if I was when a hotel employee knocked once and then barged into my room in Sao Paulo back in December while I was changing into my pajamas. (And I was plenty mad at the WTC Sheraton for that!)
However my experience stems from two long haul flights in economy and a handful of domestic flights in the same class. If someone was recording me while I was sleeping there I'd treat it the same as if I was napping under a tree in a national park. I wouldn't be concerned.
If there aren't measures in place to prevent other members of the public from observing then I expect recording is a possibility.
In many business class seats, they are designed so that you cannot even see the person adjacent to you unless you specifically put your head out of the curved herringbone shell -- and that's when you're sitting. If you're laying flat, your head is completely obscured by the seat.
Delta and Qatar have doors on some of their business class seats.
People walking through the cabin can observe people sleeping, of course -- but these products are literally designed for sleeping and privacy. It's one of the reasons they charge such a premium for those tickets.
You're in public on an aircraft, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The people around you, including the airline's staff, can listen to your conversations/see you.
I'm not even arguing legally, even just in terms of common sense, everything you do or say is isn't private in those circumstances. So a camera being there (regardless of if it is used) isn't moving the needle either direction.
Plus you're contrasting the invasion of personal space, with the perception that a non-privacy space is now non-privacy.
But since the space was never private to being with has anything changed or has the airline just ruined your own fiction about the space?
It's not public in the fact that you cannot just legally waltz into somebody else's airplane without permission. You pay a company to manage the experience in the airplane within their powers. It is perfectly fine for consumers to question why a hitherto unspoken contract about cameras directly observing a passenger's seat has been broken, and the camera placed there entirely as a result of the plane's owners.
It's the difference between a neighbor, and a neighbor who is also an informant.
Now getting into ML. What are those cheap cameras we buy in Amazon going to be capable of in 10 years - auto-recording/notification options for: nose-picking, peeing, nipple flash/down-blouse/upskirt, screaming... IDENTIFYING people by name?
Beyond this, what about public places that are gender specific- bathrooms. Heck, we may even see bathroom stall camera's that aren't "watched" by anyone but ML - just for theft monitoring. If that happens we'll likely find out, yet again, that someone with eyes was watching after all.
I get that each generation doesn't really understand how it was in the past, and just pops up into whatever privacy shit we're doing today, but we just keep letting it slide.
My point is, the needle is moving with these small changes.
You already have a number of replies covering some good ground, but there is a word covering the feeling I don't see yet: stalking. There is a fundamental difference in feeling (and a legally recognized one as well) between being seen/heard a specific coincidental instances by a crowd of random strangers whom one might quite reasonably expect to never encounter again in their entire lives -versus- having a single person individual or organization conduct persistent surveillance of you. This isn't some weird obscure situation either is it? The uncomfortableness level seems to be pretty universal. The other unrelated passengers on the airplane are generally going to be an entirely random and diverse group of total strangers. They're unlikely to remember you, to care, or to have any particular interest in you, let alone the ability and volume of information necessary to affect you.
But the airliner is a singular entity, and in this instance it's actually fairly illuminating to apply the "personhood" idea to it and consider it as if a single powerful person was following you and recording you constantly. That person does have a direct economic interest in you, may wield a certain level of monopoly power depending on location, or alternately can easily potentially collaborate with a small number of other "persons" with your information. The person will not forget and can follow you over decades. They can do the same to friends, relatives and acquaintances, drawing inferences and information from higher level social network graphs that would not be discernible from a small given slice.
Now you might not care about this yourself, but you should still be able to recognize that it's something quite different then merely "being in public amongst instantiated strangers". Historically it has been perfectly reasonable from an information theory point of view to have a certain expectation of common likely "anonymity in a crowd", because it's not physically possible for a single human to remember tens of thousands of people. Historically when attempts have been made to use some minimal level of technology and large numbers of bodies to implement mass surveillance and centralized recording an analysis it has made people quite uncomfortable (the Stasi say). There is no reason why advancing technology making it cheaper and requiring less bodies would make people suddenly be fine with it would it?
Scale sometimes brings emergent effects that are a pure function of large numbers. You can't always do a clean extrapolation.
A shopping mall might be privately owned, but it's still a public space. Any place that is open to the general public is a public space.
We license people to be private investigators. They stalk around, take pictures, and otherwise spy on what they're paid to do within the confines of the law and their license. It costs people-time to do this.
Whereas we can blanket cameras everywhere, run facial recog, and do further analytics on the saved videos. It takes roughly 0 people-hours to operate that (setup costs time, but further requires none).
And remember Cardinal Richieu's (disputed) comment "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Instead, give me a year's worth of footage..... How many felonies will you find?
Maybe you could argue that they would just be selectively enforced to remove people the state finds inconvenient. We could probably fix that legislatively by requiring a law to be enforced some high X% of times that the state becomes aware of it, because what's really the point of a law if it's ignored 99% of the time?
The thing is, technology doesn't just go away. Once something is invented, there's no uninventing it. So, we're going to have to figure out how to create a just world where public surveillance is ubiquitous.
The idea of privacy in terms of "don't look at me" is not something we do for its own sake. It exists to serve a purpose, whether that's to prevent embarrassment or prevent tyranny. We're going to need to find other ways to serve those purposes.
> How can you have privacy concerns in a completely public space?