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This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I'm in the same boat as em-bee - I am not ok with security cameras in public[1], or with public-facing doorbell cameras, either. My thought is basically: if a camera is recording the public, the public should have access to the recording. That isn't generally the case, so I'm not ok with it.

[1] Note that by "public" I mean cameras facing streets, sidewalks, etc. I can always choose not to go into a store if I don't want to be on its cameras.

The article addresses this. What you are okay with is not the sole basis for determining what is ethical. For instance, I am not okay with you reading this text. I meant it for everyone except mdorazio. I demand you apologize.

If you took this to a regulator they would probably laugh at you, but from what I can tell this statement is technically enforceable under GDPR.

I disagree with this.

I consider the human eye a camera. It also saves videos in a storage medium that doesn't permit deletion. I don't distinguish between a silicon-based camera and a carbon-based camera. To me they're just different rows of the periodic table.

In fact I even hope to think that one day silicon-based cameras can be used to restore vision to carbon-based beings that have non-functioning carbon-based cameras. To that extent even if I have functioning carbon-based cameras, having a silicon-based camera attached to my body is just an extension of my body and you most certainly do not have the right of access to the memories it records, regardless of whether those memories are stored in neurons or in an SD card (even that detail is not your right to know; I could have had a flash memory implant in my brain and it would be a HIPAA violation if you demanded to know what implants I have).

To ban silicon-based cameras is a gross ADA violation. To demand to know exactly by what mechanism videos are stored is a HIPAA violation. If you want to ban recording you might as well blindfold everyone while you're at it.

We’re living in the present, not some cybernetic future. To say all this when it’s not relevant to the present is a little silly in my view.

We don’t have cameras and flash embedded in ourselves, someone’s recollections are not the same as an video file in terms of evidence, and there’s a substantial difference between someone actively on the street corner watching and security camera you can set and forget which will record 24/7.

> We’re living in the present, not some cybernetic future.

Maybe you aren't, that doesn't mean everyone chooses that lifestyle or should be forced into that mode of thinking.

I for one choose to think in terms of the future.

> We don’t have cameras and flash embedded in ourselves

Oh you bet I do happen to have a piece of flash storage embedded in my body, for a reason I choose to not disclose here. Although mine is not wired into an imaging device, it's only a matter of time before someone else's flash implant IS wired to an imaging device, and they have every right to.

The human eye, with or without a cybernetic enhancement is admissible in court. Indeed 'eye witness' testimony, despite being horribly unreliable is particularly powerful in court.

Personally I see little to no difference between human eyes and film eyes when one is standing in the middle of the street 50 years ago, let alone now with some implied cybernetics that make the difference actually zero.

If the argument is that a snapshot can not be observed as a collection of light wa eves hitting cellulose, or a digital sesnsor then one has to ask the question if allow the receptors in the human eyeball to detect the reflections of light is acceptable either.

Your memories carry little to no weight if they conflict with some more tangible record in a dispute. When that changes, there will no doubt be other ramifications, like neural disrupters or jamming technologies.

The issue is whether a vast difference in quantity and price creates a difference on principle.

For example, if surveying a person in the 1970s cost $300k per year to have them constantly followed, the cops needed few other limits as the cost alone means it won’t become pervasive.

But if you can get almost the same surveillance in 2021 for $10 per annum, nothing qualitative has changed - but the primary control on overreach has gone.

If you're going to make a high level argument, you should base it on something higher than two particular laws that have been passed by the government.

> I consider the human eye a camera. It also saves videos in a storage medium that doesn't permit deletion

The key distinction is that the human eye and its storage system doesn't meaningfully support duplication and distribution of the picture.

What someone saw is not going to show up in Clearview's biometric surveillance database years later, and while this one human may remember me, the inherent limitations of humans mean that the impact is vastly different from what is possible with technology.

> The key distinction is that the human eye and its storage system doesn't meaningfully support duplication and distribution of the picture.

That isn't necessarily true. Just because your eye doesn't doesn't mean mine doesn't. How do you know I wasn't born blind and retrofitted with a silicon eye that gives me both the ability to see and record/duplicate more easily than other humans?

This is a bad faith reply. Non-existent hypothetical devices are not worth considering when talking about the morality of something that someone does today.

I choose to frame my view of morality in terms of technological developments that are likely to happen in the next 100 years (approximately a human lifetime for anyone born today), not what exists today. Today is antiquated as soon as something is invented something tomorrow.

"Hypothetical" is an assumption. You don't know what I have, and what I'm experimenting with.

I saw this a while ago, Argus II implant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05ee61Bu-Ok

It exists, albeit only B&W and at a very low resolution. However as we all know, technology can advance very quickly, and high resolution cameras are not inconceivable for this application.

I don’t know. I’d be roughly as uncomfortable with someone tweeting to a large audience that they saw me at a certain location at a certain time as I would be with someone posting a photo of me to a large audience.

That's the difference though. It doesn't happen in practice if you aren't famous, because the person with the eye can only do a limited number of things at the same time, and spending all day tweeting about random people isn't what most people want to spend their time on.

Sorry to be that pedant that zeroes in a singular point that in no way nullifies the larger argument being made--but that isn't how HIPAA works at all.

I guess I have similar feelings but it's not so much about whether the public can access it. It's about the fact that I'm not so comfortable with surveillance in general.

I would also feel uncomfortable if they had street corners full of watchmen hired to just stare and keep track of everyone. I would feel uncomfortable at work if they had people or cameras positioned to stare over my shoulder. It's not the camera, it's the surveillance.

And by that token, I'm ok with street photography. I love street photography. It's completely different from surveillance.

> Note that by "public" I mean cameras facing streets, sidewalks, etc. I can always choose not to go into a store if I don't want to be on its cameras.

Given how cheap and ubiquitous internet-connected security cams are now, this seems like a distinction without a difference. Unless you expect the “free market” to deliver a brand of “proudly webcam-free” businesses (don’t hold your breath), this is just going to mean that you can’t go in any stores.

The problem with surveillance is that law enforcement is not acting in your interests as an individual. Your image, captured on camera near a crime scene, becomes evidence of your guilt. It puts the onus on you to prove your innocence, and if law enforcement is lazy, fallible, stupid, or you just get unlucky, you're going to prison for a crime you didn't commit. Or you're going to get tangled up in a legal defense that could cost you years worth of paychecks to prove your innocence.

"I've got nothing to hide" is not a valid opinion to have with regards to surveillance - the two options are "I have information to share with the state" and "I do not wish to share information with the state. " Since the state is almost universally in an adversarial relationship with citizens, it never makes sense for a citizen to share information with the state unless compelled to (the processes of state compulsion have stricter rules and precedents that have higher levels of protections against casual abuse. A lawyer can recommend 5th amendment if necessary when compelled to testify. )

https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE

I think the side of private photography is much simpler. If you're in public you should expect to be seen and/or recorded. Public places are places where you have zero expectation of privacy. We should celebrate the art that comes from public photography.

I think we're long overdue for a sweeping, constitutional level reform of information privacy rights that protect citizens from abuses and reinforce modern norms around recording in public. It's obvious that we're living under the panopticon, so we need a system that accounts for that.

> Your image, captured on camera near a crime scene, becomes evidence of your guilt. It puts the onus on you to prove your innocence, and if law enforcement is lazy, fallible, stupid, or you just get unlucky, you're going to prison for a crime you didn't commit. Or you're going to get tangled up in a legal defense that could cost you years worth of paychecks to prove your innocence.

This is literally just FUD, albeit you're as much a victim of it as you are a vector.

As someone who was recently on a jury for a criminal trial that was based almost entirely on copious video camera surveillance footage (no, not that trial), a jury that acquitted the defendant of all charges (almost immediately, save for a few hangers on, including myself), your fears seem largely unfounded. Both the law and the judgement of humans heavily emphasize intent and motivation, and camera footage is neutral in that regard.

Admittedly, it's no picnic being subject to state-sponsored prosecution. But that was always the case, and despite all the FUD rooted in an unhealthily extreme anti-authoritarian sentiment (partially a product of our victim culture) that leaves little room for civil society to function, there's still conspicuously few claims, let alone evidence, that camera footage will result in a greater prevalence of false prosecutions, particularly for non-traffic offenses.

I'm MUCH more comfortable with street photography than CCTV.

I don't care if my image is taken in public, I have no expectation of privacy in the moment.

But I do care about subsequent analysis of, and storage of linked metadata about those images.

A random street photographer or member of the public is unlikely to be connected to a permanent, secret, and searchable database of facial recognition, gait analysis, or whatever else linked to bluetooth/phone signals to identify people in the images.

I cannot say that about the many, many CCTV cameras that seem to be everywhere.

Some people may think that's paranoid, but that's exactly what they would have said about mass surveillance pre-Snowden, and when you look at how much data they were storing and analyzing back then, think about what they're probably doing now...

Such scary things are possible now that couldn't have been imagined even 20 years ago.

Well, once someone publishes your street photo, it becomes instantly available to a plethora of searchable databases from all kinds of jurisdictions.

If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations.

But that would be just a single image with no context, and usually no location and no ability to link it to bluetooth or phone number, as most online services remove exif data now, I belive.

It's not like a fixed CCTV camera that is continuously recording and being constantly analyzed and stored forever, and can detect regular patterns of behavior, and thereby able to automatically tag things that are "out of the ordinary".

>If it's CCTV, it's just one company that manages the photos, under local regulations.

How could you possibly know that? There is nothing to say that the information is not being shared. TBH, it's extremely naive to think that information stays inside the building, or that the three-letter agencies haven't already connected those thousands of cameras.

It's interesting that you use the word "photos" too, what I'm worried about is much more than photos, it's a permanent historical record of dates/times/movement patterns that can be linked over thousands of cameras, creating a continuous historical record of everyone's movements, all linked to those photos. They can track a single person's movements over years. It can also correlate with other people to detect who may be connected to who. Bigdata tracking everyone at all times.

Give me a random person snapping street photos any day.

Any way you cut it, fixed cameras are more worrisome.

Two citations from Malhotra et al. (2004) [1] come to my mind here:

First, "any act of data collection […] is the starting point of various information privacy concerns” (p. 338).

Second, privacy can be defined as “the degree to which a person is concerned about the amount of individual-specific data possessed by others relative to the value of benefits received” (p. 338)

This explains why we are so sensitive if random people take pictures of us, without our consent. Usually, there is nothing we can gain, but a lot to loose, under some circumstances. In Social Media, it is necessary to acknowledge both sides of the trade - users also gain something, which is why they/we are more willingly to give up some part of their/our privacy. This is also the case, to some degree, in public street surveillance. It is not the case, however, in random street photography.

[1] Malhotra, N.K.; Kim, S.S.; Agarwal, J. Internet users’ information privacy concerns (IUIPC): The construct, the scale, and a causal model. Inf. Syst. Res. 2004, 15, 336–355.

i do take issue with security cameras filming me. it bothers me, because yes, maybe the images get wiped unseen, but maybe not. how secure are those cameras? who gets access to the feed?

on the other hand, if a photographer takes a photo of me, i don't care as long as the photo doesn't get published.

i take photos myself, and in general my attitude is that publishing one of my photos requires the permission of all subjects in it. when i put photos on my own website then i explicitly add a license that allows a subject in the photo to use it for their own purposes as they see fit.

so as a photographer i explicitly give control back to the subjects in the photo, because that is how i believe this should be handled.

"Racy Photos Were Often Shared at N.S.A., Snowden Says" - New York Times (July 20, 2014)

In 2021, to take a photo with a smartphone is to publish it, worldwide and forever.

(Of course I still take plenty of pictures of myself and friends. It's just not a clear line anymore what we get to control when social media and corporate/government leaks are everywhere)

When entering stores with security cameras, I wonder how many use facial recognition tools and then how that information is being used / aggregated / sold.

It would be good to know whether facial recognition is being used before entering a business.

It is a difficult subject. A store security camera that cycles every weeks is no big deal. But what if there are cameras on every street corner run by the government and saved for 5 years? What about Ring footage of your neighborhood/building being saved for 5 years? The tough question is how do we separate what the data could be used for and what it is likely to be used for. And if we aren't vigilant now, could we just wake up one day and it is too late?

> Maybe it's like somebody mining for diamonds under my house - they've found some value in something I didn't know I had, but I now want my share.

And this is one of the harder parts of assigning value to something like this... What is a person's share when someone exploits a resource that the first party had some kind of nominal claim to (i.e. "my land," even though really you live above that 3D region of space, not within it) but zero ability / opportunity / inclination to exploit?

There's volumes and volumes of legal precedent on this topic for tangibles, let alone the increasingly-intangibles that we can monetize online.

Value can be created without it being “taken” from anywhere.

Right; with the notable exception of value provided by governments, which largely comes out of the pockets of the working class.

"Money coming out of pockets" isn't evidence that value is "taken" from anywhere. The more cooperative exchanges of value we have, the more valuable and prosperous our economies are.

This reminds me of PG's essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

"A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world."

My worry about it is how street photographers are able to convey meaning through context, captions, etc. I don't mind someone taking a photo of me if they get permission afterwards to post it and I'm able to ask them to take it down. However, I don't like losing control over my image.

But it’s not yours. You don’t own your “image”, just like you don’t own your DNA.

It’s not reasonable to expect to require permission for someone to use your image that they captured. What if it’s for news purposes? What if it’s related to, say, and insurance fraud investigation? If you keep trying to draw the line, it gets harder and harder to draw.

So what’s reasonable? If you have an expectation of privacy that’s violated, that seems far. But if you do not, i.e. you are in public, you have no such expectation.

Now, photographs shot through a window? Close your blinds or shut up. It’s all up to you.

> But if you do not, i.e. you are in public,

What if you're on the street outside an HIV clinic? Or an abortion clinic? Or an STI clinic? Or a substance misuse clinic? Or a narcotics anonymous meeting?

What if you're on the street, but have clearly just exited the door from that clinic?

This isn't idle noodling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_v_MGN_Ltd

"The House of Lords held MGN liable by majority vote, with lords Nicholls and Hoffmann dissenting. Baroness Hale, Lord Hope and Lord Carswell held that the picture added something of 'real significance'. The court engaged in a balancing test, firstly determining whether the applicant had a reasonable expectation of privacy (thus determining whether Art.8 ECHR was involved). It then considered whether, if the claimant was successful, this would result in a significant inference with freedom of expression (balancing Art. 8 with Art. 10). It was held that Campbell's right to privacy (ECHR, Sch 1, Part I, Art 8) outweighed MGN's right to freedom of expression (ECHR Art 10)."

So there is a specific legal cutout for those cases.

The legal system is not usually made up of complete idiots.

> The legal system is not usually made up of complete idiots.

Certainly not. There is the “evil asshole” contingent as well, but I expect a bit of overlap between the two.

Why, don't I own my dna?

Your “flesh and bone” are certainly yours. But DNA?

You didn’t create it, it’s not original, and yours is 99.9% identical to mine. You cannot copyright or patent it. And you’re pretty sloppy with it, leaving a trail of it everywhere you go.

In the united states you do in fact own and have a right to control commercial exploitation of your image / likeness, with exceptions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...

News coverage is a common exception.

A fraud investigation is not commercial exploitation.

> If you keep trying to draw the line, it gets harder and harder to draw.

You're not qualified to make statements like this.

> You're not qualified to make statements like this.

Maybe, maybe not. Who the f*ck are you? (See how that works?)

>I don't mind someone taking a photo of me if they get permission afterwards to post it and I'm able to ask them to take it down. However, I don't like losing control over my image.

Perhaps you do not like loosing control over photographer and art expression of others? Perhaps 'control over image' is just an excuse for that?

Would you like to control all forms of arts? Just imagine the possibilities... They will publish what you allow. They would draw what you permit. They will beg you to forgive them if they did not satisfy your taste. You will have complete control over you image and not only photo image the public image too. Think about press. If they have something critical to say about you they would need your permission before they publish. Would you like all that?

It is novel and interesting because it compares the value of an image taken accidentally by a security camera to an image taken intentionally by a photographer. The author states that our value flows like the wind and photography captures it, which I thought was correct since photography is to record a moment in a constantly changing world.

the problem isnt value or really consent, its that the photographer cant see the future. it also involves not just value but also cost and risk. Social media and the ability for things to go viral has made it possible for even the most innocent and mundane/valueless media to have a huge impact/cost to the person in it. It could be anxiety and depression triggered by being in a viral meme. A video of a real or perceived mistake normally overlooked and ignored suddenly ruins their career and some relationships.

The subject, just as with the value may have no real way of knowing the cost and risk. most will assume there is no value, cost or risk like virtually every other photo and have no problem with it. Or they will think of those ever so rare photos that they see all the time at the top of their feed and either want far to much in compensation or never allow any photos they cant control taken.

The problem isnt really consent its that the photographer and subject cant predict the future. If the photographer knew the photo would never see general public viewing, win any prizes be seen by the subject or anyone they know. both the photographer and subject wouldn't care about consent. on the other hand if the photographer knew exactly how popular, how much value would be derived from it and the cost it would have on the subject they wouldn't hesitate to get consent and maybe offer some compensation based on the cost the photo would have on the subjects life.

it is however so rare a single photo has significance on anything, that everyone just assumes its not worth getting consent. only photo's where someone expects privacy is it assumed the cost to the subject is usually too high and requires consent.

Thinking about the security-cameras vs photographer thing:

- Security cameras: At least in theory, security camera footage is mostly private, and recorded with a specific, 'good' goal: if something happens, they have the security footage. It can be useful to me if someone robs me and they can get identified because they were filmed.

- Photographer: absolutely no use to me, and possibly going to share that picture on instagram, facebook, whatever, making 'everyone' knows that I was at there at that point.

Are we talking about rights or your convenience? Does a person has a right to freely express himself in any art form including photography?

This is a response to the parent, which said:

> As people have mentioned, security cameras are filming me all the time - and I've no issue with that.

> If one of these frames was taken by a photographer deliberately - then suddenly I care more. Why did he take it? What was I doing? Where will it be shown? To whom will it be shown? What will they think of me, based upon it etc etc.

I was just expanding on that. But go ahead and read my reply without thinking about what I was replying to

>I was just expanding on that.

Yes you were just explaining on that but you 'were explaining on that' purely from the convenience and point of view while if you think about right for the free speech it is frequently not so much convenient when you hear criticism. That is why I asked the question and the question stands.