Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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