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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah this is interesting - street photography has historically not involved a lot of consent, and photographers who professionally shoot in public have generally defended their right to do so.

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.

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I mean, as I understand it, this policy would only apply if the person in question objected to their picture being taken and disseminated.

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.

Yes. See their announcement https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i...:

>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.

This is a FUCK-TON of leeway.

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'

Who did the deleting in your example? If it was by the poster, this doesn't seem relevant at all.

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?

Why would they have to restore anything?

It's like DMCA for people. Can't wait for for the abuse circus.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fifteen-years-dmca-abuse

As someone who has been fighting a Sisyphean battle to minimize the Internet footprint/exposure of his photo and other bits of private life, this is a welcome change. So far, in order to keep your face off the internet, you need to 1. Not take pictures of yourself and post them, and 2. Make sure each and every one of your friends know you don't want your photo posted and that they respect your wishes. #2 was a lot easier when everyone in the world didn't have a camera in their pocket at all hours of the day. And, yes, I deliberately ask friends and family to just not post my picture to Social Media, and they constantly forget. With the ubiquity of traffic cameras, business surveillance, Ring door cameras, and so on, it's getting to the point where if you want to keep private, you need to never leave the house, which, sorry, I think is an unreasonable request.

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.

That's how the law work in Germany and I'm okay with it. Ot puts a damper on the /r/publicfreakout type of internet bullying.

We've had people try to take photos of our children without consent while we are at the beach. The people were thinking the kids were doing something cute or that it was funny they were throwing a huge fit.

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.

There have been plenty of time I've seen some cute kids doing something cute. But it feels creepy to take pics of kids you don't know, as the main subject. On the other hand if im taking photos of something else, while I try not to get random people in the shot, but if I do...

True, but it was also relatively harder for pictures to become famous, and there wasn't massive face recognition systems to use the data in unexpected ways. Also, a lot more people are taking pictures, and though I'm not art-gatekeeping, it's fair to say that at least the motivational context for most photography is different now than it was historically.

The woman in the photo didn't consent to the kiss either apparently.

From the wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_Day_in_Times_Square:

> The photograph does not clearly show the face of either person involved, and numerous people have claimed to be the subjects.

This is an unpopular view but I think that photos of strangers in public are a vital illumination of humanity. You see in people's faces, in the moment, the drama of excitement, love, apathy, boredom, anger - the full range of emotion and what it means to be a human in the world. Actors in movies or staged photos never give us that. They never glow in the way that a person in the street does who is surprised by a friend.

Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated. Societally, we should get over ourselves a bit.

> Despite the take that these public photographs are "privacy" violations, I think they should be celebrated

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.

It's not about "enjoyment". It's about documenting history in a very real and normal way. These are the photos that future historians will study. Would you rather them have a huge black hole because people decided "my privacy rights when I'm in public are more important than everything else", which I honestly see to be a more entitled viewpoint.

I’m not sure “people not yet alive have a right to mundane details of your life” is the less entitled position, tbh. In their defense, they’re not the ones making that argument.

There is absolutely no lack of material of any kind to document this period of history. There will be no huge black hole just because we respect the privacy of people who don’t want to appear in public photos.

Fact is, there will be no black hole. As much as people try to put the genie back in the bottle with TOS and even law, the tech is not going away.

Why do you feel it's a violation of your privacy to have a picture of you on the internet on a popular forum? Particularly if the photo or it's caption does not name you, the context in which it was taken, or the date.

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.

Because it's my image, and I should be able to exert a reasonable control over it. When someone publishes my image, I lose that control, and in these days that could mean anything, from people ignoring it to people making a meme out of it. And I also I shouldn't have to justify why do I have a right to control my own image.

> 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".

> And I also I shouldn't have to justify why do I have a right to control my own image.

Today you do, because it is not a recognized right, just an opinion some people hold.

Photographs taken in public... aren't private! If you don't want to be photographed in public places, don't go to public places.

This is extremely backwards. You don't need to photograph anyone in public places. Would you be ok with having a photo making a ridiculous face online? Or a photo where it looks like you're going to hit someone? Or a photo ignoring a homeless person? All of those would miss context, of course, but the Internet doesn't need context to do whatever with that pic.

This is all settled law. Anything in public can be photographed freely. Numerous cases.

In some countries.

Well, in Spain's it is settled law as you say: you need to ask for consent to distribute images of someone save for a few exceptions, in which "I took a photo of someone in the street" doesn't fit. So it's settled law depending on your country.

I'm inclined to agree with you but the fact that people can now be trivially identified through face recognition in photos changes the considerations here a bit.

This isn’t actually going to be used against most people posting street photographs, just the ones Twitter wants to get rid of for which there isn’t already a tool in the TOS they can selectively apply. Goodthinkful citizens will not be affected.

It seems even more restrictive than that -- the person (or some authority) has to notify Twitter and request its removal. It's focused on preventing doxxing and abuse.

https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i...

That isn't what it says. It says you have to show proof of the consent first. This makes it super like you can take a photo of anything in public that has random people in the shot

Where do you see that?

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.

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