Expanding our private information policy to include media
blog.twitter.com
blog.twitter.com
Consider e.g. every photo in https://www.magnumphotos.com/shop/collections/books/rfk-fune... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_Day_in_Times_Square -- those folks didn't consent and can't. It's not newsworthy, it's just artistically interesting. Fair enough if Twitter doesn't want to be a platform for it.
> The photograph does not clearly show the face of either person involved, and numerous people have claimed to be the subjects.
Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated. Societally, we should get over ourselves a bit.
I don't know why your enjoyment of a photo should take priority over the right to privacy of people. In a world where anything could become a meme overnight, I would very much prefer my image to not be tweeted publicly without my consent, specially by people with a large audience.
If the photographer wants to portray those emotions, make the photo and ask later, and delete them if the person doesn't want to have a picture taken of. I understand that for most people the risks will outweigh the benefits.
I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy? What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public, then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online. I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
> I feel like if you carry the argument far enough, then this should extend to satellite imagery of your home. Isn't that an equivalent violation of your privacy?
Yes it is. Luckily published satellite imagery doesn't tend to have enough resolution to actually make out distinguishing details of what would be going on in my backyard, but I'd actually be angry if they did.
> What about traffic cameras and other webcams setup in public places for public consumption online?
Luckily again, those usually don't have enough resolution to make out identifying details.
> If I have an equivalent right to photograph in public,
You don't. Privacy trumps your right to photograph in public. If you feel I'm making a funny face, you don't have the right to make me a photo.
> then it's an undue burden on me and a probably an even greater violation of your privacy to chase you and everyone else down and ask for the rights to reproduce it online
Asking for permission is not a violation of privacy.
> I'm not sure this is a feature I want to add to our public spaces.
The solution is easy: then don't make photos where people are identifiable without their permission. The alternative is you do, and imagine that you post it and someone makes a meme out of someone that appears there. How would you feel about it? Would your opinion change if someone came to you and said "hey, remember that photo you published where I was on it? Well now I'm the laughing stock of half a million people".
Today you do, because it is not a recognized right, just an opinion some people hold.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i...
The only portions relevant to this that I see in that blog post are consistent with free-to-post, remove-on-complaint:
>When private information or media has been shared on Twitter, we need a first-person report or a report from an authorized representative in order to make the determination that the image or video has been shared without their permission.
This paragraph wouldn't even make sense if you had to provide proof on upload. Unless this is to say the uploaded proof was counterfeit or something?
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it.
And, to be honest, I'm probably OK with that. At the very least I am not convinced by older arguments of "you shouldn't have any expectations of privacy in a public place". I think there is a fundamental difference between other people being able to see you, heck even other people being able to take a picture of you, vs. it automatically being OK for others to disseminate your imagine to literally billions of people, recorded for all time.
>When we are notified by individuals depicted, or by an authorized representative, that they did not consent to having their private image or video shared, we will remove it. This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
Imagine a situation where someone punches someone else that is recorded. Millions examples of that on the internet, lols were had, whatever and deleted. Afterward someone makes the claim that it is a hate crime and since twitter isn't the only place where media is stored, do they restore every single instance of the original set of tweets?
What is the dividing line between them? When is something private versus something that is 'to the public interest'
If Twitter is the one deleting it, then I guess that's a judgment call at the time, but to me that sounds like it's in the public interest.
You want there to be less leeway?
It would be wonderful if I could just generate some perceptual hash of my face, upload that hash to social media sites, and be able to demand they delete (or black out) any instance of my face they find. Yes, this could be abused, but the status quo (no privacy for anyone without exceedingly great OpSec) is worse.
There does seem to be some difference between being the subject in a photo and happening to be in a being in a photo of a beach sunset.
It is entirely legal to publish a photo of, say, someone walking down the street without their consent.
It is _not_ legal to do so in such a way that implies endorsement. So you could publish a photo of "people busy shopping in Oxford Street" without getting signed model release from everyone depicted in the photo. But you couldn't publish the same photo and claim "these are 500 happy people who've just bought the new ZogPhone at the Zog Store on Oxford Street!".
That's fine. Typically, every summer, UK newspapers will print a front-cover photo of a crowded beach with a headline about "here's lots of people enjoying the sunshine". (We're British, we love talking about the weather.) And that's the case throughout UK media. I used to edit the best-selling magazine about inland boating. Every month, our cover would be a photo of someone happily steering their boat on a river or canal. We didn't get model release: we didn't need to under UK law.
Those front covers can no longer be tweeted. Twitter now says:
> Under our private information policy, you can’t share the following types of private information or media, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:
> NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.
Is Twitter really going to take down the front page of the Guardian or the Financial Times because they haven't got signed model release for everyone in that crowd photo? I'm not convinced this has been thought through.
And if that wasn't enough, there's also:
"For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites)"
Which seems to explicitly cover "newspaper front pages" as an exception.
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
Twitter should be fine if they're operating under local definitions of legal consent. If they're going to roll their own, things could get legally ugly - paparazzi could have legitimate claims of discrimination and financial damages.
Almost certainly this will be enforced only following a report. Which means I have a photograph of you which you did not consent to being in and you object to me sharing.
I think in that case it's reasonable to expect me to justify why I should be allowed to share the picture. And I may be able to, but the burden of proof should be on me.
Then it's impossible to take pictures of public spaces. There's a reason why you do not have the benefit of privacy in a public space.
I have repeatedly argued that we need legal user protections that protect users from large corporations arbitrarily enforcing their rules with no real appeal process or transparency. However, fear mongering with projections that have no basis in reality does not help move us in that direction.
Point number 1: Even if you stretch hard, the closest I can get is 'it wouldn't be permitted to take pictures of public spaces with people in who don't consent to being photographed and then share those on Twitter'.
Point number 2: It is true that in some countries, you have no (legal) expectation of privacy in a public place. However, it's not universally true. Where I am, for example, in Hungary, actually something very similar to Twitter's new policy is the law[0]).
Although there may be no LEGAL constraint where you live, perhaps you wouldn't want someone standing outside the local reproductive health or women's shelter photographing everyone who goes in and out. I certainly wouldn't.
What I'm saying is that if someone has a photograph of me which I didn't consent to being in, then I think it's reasonable that if I object to them sharing they photo, then they should have the 'burden of proof' that they have a right to share.
I don't think that 'burden of proof' needs to be particularly high, and 'oh, they're just in the background in my photo of the street' or 'I thought it might be interesting that they were snorting cocaine on the main street' is OK.
The problem is that 'public spaces' and 'benefit of privacy' are terms that date back to before the internet.
The trivial difficulty and cost of creating, processing, distributing, and cataloguing data through facial recognition, geolocation, etc. today means it's at least worth considering whether these laws are the best fit for our modern lives, rather than throwing out criticisms as though one specific law is both written in stone and applies everywhere.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/14/hungary-law-ph...
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
I think this is more an attempt at blocking targeted harassment of private individuals.
1. Target identifies disputed photo of themself.
2. Twitter issues a dispute ID / QR
3. Target sends in a fresh selfie with the dispute ID printed or on a screen alongside.
4. Twitter performs face analysis of both images and OCR of ID.
5. If faces match and ID is validated, Twitter takes down the disputed image.
If you are saying that third-parties will scale up access to Twitter's automation in order to take down virtually anything they wish, well I don't see how the proposed system would be so readily exploited. To issue a take down, you'd need to be in possession of the face.
(IANAL, these are my admittedly simple and probably naïve assumptions)
Edit: words
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
2. The parent comment was about other, private individuals in the same photo. Given Twitter’s very spotty track record of inconsistent moderation (regardless of any real or perceived bias), any grey area here will certainly be a target—whether or not a successful one—for abuse of this new rule. I can, for instance, easily imagine it being used in an attempt to suppress images/video of police responses to confrontations between BLM protestors and pick-your-counterprotestors.
3. Moreover, I can imagine fabricated claims of such moderation action being taken, sewing all sorts of disinformation about events—real or likewise fabricated—and information about them that never existed, or existed in a significantly different form.
4. While I’m generally more in favor [than probably the average HN reader] of privately owned websites being able to moderate their sites as they deem appropriate… this particular example is the first I thought of where this rule as written may have significant, harmful consequences.
This is Twitter we're talking about. Trust me, if you take a picture of police doing something wrong (or even appearing to have done something wrong) Twitter will find a way to make sure the rules don't apply to that picture.
The next step is Twitter will have a formal list of approved media outlets (gee I wonder which ones it might be) where if they publish it first, Twitter will allow it. Selective reporting seems to be one of the primary tools for media bias/activism, and this is Twitter figuring out their own way to selectively ban content they don't like instead of the current user generated openness.
(Edit: Well, w/ the partial exception of HN, of course!)
As an aside- a benefit of just not using social media for news is that I miss out on a lot of things that almost always turn out to not be important. There is a higher threshold. I'm not succumbed by some hot issue or crisis for a day that is ultimately meaningless. Coworkers would often ask me my thoughts on an issue and I'd have no clue what they're talking about. It's liberating. Sometimes less is more.
Is it a good use of time? Who knows, hard to say. It's interesting, sometimes even addictive.
I do agree that on an emotional level we should be most occupied with living the tangible, real lives in front of us, and not worry too much about history roiling by all around us.
https://twitter.com/NellieBowles/status/1465724183044841473
It does seem crafted to gatekeep citizen journalists who are a major thorn in the corporate media's official narrative.
Ngo: "Oregon lawmakers introduced a bill to stop public record access to arrest photographs after I documented who was arrested at the riots last year."
And now Twitter introduces this new policy the day after Jack resigns. Presumably stopping people like Ngo tweeting about arrested people had been a long term desire of the internal faction whose ascent is now complete with the new CEO, so bye bye videos of peaceful protests!
The exemptions they have set aside will be abused to allow things like leaks of Trump’s tax returns while silencing videos showing CNN’s biased electoral manipulation of viewers:
> This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures or individuals when media and accompanying Tweet text are shared in the public interest or add value to public discourse.
>NEW: media of private individuals without the permission of the person(s) depicted.
> We will always try to assess the context in which the content is shared and, in such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service. For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest, or is relevant to the community.
Oh, never mind. It's now only allowed in situations of cancelling people.
This logic comes about because of bad assumptions about what a platform is, how it works at scale and how personal rights and liberties are mapped to Internet services, especially those of government. Promoting the idea of "cancel culture" among the population is definitely a thing and easily digested and accepted as a truth, even thought it's really not.
Cancel Culture is a form of targeted harassment, generally originating online but not exclusive to that domain, where a group of individuals take offense to comments, opinions, jokes or "hot takes" then having become offend proceed either in coordination with others or not to contact the target of their harassment employers, landlords, business associates, family members, schools, etc in an effort to interfere with the relationships (personal or business) they have with the target of the harassment.
It is very much real, it is very much a reality, and it goes beyond simply "boycotts" of a business with a policy one dislikes.
People continuing to deny the existence of cancel culture highlights either an extreme ignorance of the modern world, or a willful disingenuous gaslighting in order to aid and continue to perpetuate cancel culture. I will leave it open to debate which of the 2 you are.
Codified with a question of "should you combat bad speech with good speech or with silencing?"
However there are other aspects of this shift that fall outside of cancel culture. For example the fact that a platform like twitter can have a CEO that publicly supports the rejection of the 1st amendment is also a symptom of this cultural shift, a few decades ago that would not have been possible, in fact it likely would have resulted in high level board meetings and a PR disaster in the 80's and 90's if a CEO of a large public company would have stated opposition to free speech.
We has a nation (the US) have lost desire to uphold the cultural principle of free expression, the law has become a needed check on this cultural shift but sadly the law only survives as a check for 2 maybe 3 generations, if we do not do something to shift us back to being a culture that respects free expression the law will fall to the new culture of non-expression or controlled expression and a new dark ages will emerge
I mean, you shouldn't call it cancel culture at any point. Depending on the audience, your example could either never be what "cancel culture" means, or be the primary definition. Unless you know that you are addressing one of those audiences alone, then the phrase only creates confusion.
I don't know why deplatforming requires proof of an identity. I think this is you adding to the definition of a word that doesn't follow how everyone uses it.
`Feeling safe on Twitter is different for everyone` and `The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities.`
This is opposition to photography laws in the US and many other countries, that allows the publishing of photographs of private individuals, as long as they can be viewed from a public space.