Twitter photo-removal policy aimed at improving privacy goes into effect
text.npr.org
text.npr.org
They also REALLY don't like that Project Veritas uses their service to link people to undercover videos of big tech companies admitting to doing shady stuff. Big tech covers for big tech.
German law, for example, generally protects people's privacy (i.e. you are not allowed to take a photo of people without permission, even in public). But it implements fine-grained exceptions for people of national importance - either globally (i.e. politicians who remain so) or temporarily (i.e. you may take photographs of such people for a time but no longer when they have ceased to be famous).
I'm curious how this is expected to work in practice. Is there a clear definition of "a photo of people"? Taking a close-up portrait of a random stranger in public would be one extreme (and I guess most people would agree it should require permission). Presumably a photo of my kids and their friends having fun at the park is still clearly "a photo of people", and therefore also requires permission.
But if I take a photo of a street scene in Berlin, do I have to get permission from every passer-by who happens to appear? How about a landscape photo where I only realise later, on reviewing the picture, that there were a couple of hikers on a distant hill? To my mind, that's not "a photo of people", yet there are people in the photo.
Somewhere between the extremes, it seems to me there's an awfully wide grey area.
* https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/apr/11/judges-lenient-b...
99% of cases are going to be pretty clear.
Most of the time, the prohibition is on distribution. And it's only applicable when the people in the picture can be reasonably identified. A street scene in Berlin where you barely see people's faces or two hikers on a distant hill wouldn't be problematic.
I think the law needs to be updated, since face recognition software is now available.
There are three cases where you can publish[1] a photo without consent:
- Person of special public interest (literally: person of contemporary history, this is an idiomatic term and sounds less strange in German), which means you can take a picture of a politician holding a speech or an artist doing a public performance or a CEO addressing employees. Important exception for professionals, but there are various rules one needs to be aware of, for instance you probably cannot take a photo of the same CEO buying new shoes or eating dinner at a restaurant.
- The photograph does not primarily depict the person. Your landscape photo would be fine, for example, and your street scene may or may not be. Apparently the test criterion is: is the picture materially changed if the person is removed? So a photo of a beach landscape is permissible, but not so much if there's people bathing in the foreground.
- The photo is of a public gathering: a public concert, a political rally, though this only applies if it's a photo of the gathering as a whole, and not specifically an individual in it.
So, yes, in the end it is a bit of a case of "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it". In practice, you just err on the side of caution, and it works out fine. E.g. I don't really worry about if when I take a photo of a friend outside and there's a few people in the background (due to rule #2).
Source (German): https://www.medienrecht-urheberrecht.de/fotorecht-bildrecht/...
[1] I'm not sure how the law handles the case of merely taking a photo and never publishing it, nor what exactly constitutes publishing, e.g. presumably showing holiday snaps at a family gathering does not constitute publishing
Beyond that, while the rules outlined above deal with publishing, there are also rules for merely taking pictures. The exact rules for that aren't 100% clear to me[1], but if it's permissible to publish them, it must also be permissible to take the photo in the first place.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recht_am_eigenen_Bild_(Deutsch... it seems complicated
There's a common misconception in Germany that there is a law about "Beamtenbeleidigung" (insult of a public official) but the truth is that public officials have no special protection in that regard per se, it's just usually easier for them to sue people (esp. when you insult a police officer as they're literally the police). There are some caveats when insulting government officials, especially foreign government officials, but insulting a Nazi politician on Facebook is not any different from insulting a celebrity on Facebook.
The problem with social media is that it can be difficult to find out who to sue and compelling a foreign company to release the likely incomplete information they have on a user in an attempt to identify them isn't great. I'm not saying the law in question (NetzDG, requiring social media companies to block such content in Germany) is a good solution to this problem but it's certainly not the worst.
If anything, the problem with NetzDG is that it allows users who are able to avoid revealing their identity unambiguously to engage in Holocaust denialism or Volksverhetzung[0] and have their posts still be visible with a proxy if blocked (allowing Nazi groups to organize and operate hidden in plain sight) or when the content is deleted for those crimes to just be swept under the rug and make it harder to report to the actual authorities rather than the social media company. Social media companies like Twitter have also made it nearly impossible to report ToS violations in Germany as the report button immediately funnels you into NetzDG technicalities users aren't meant to understand like which specific law you believe the offending post violates.
This is clearly not true though. People end up in other peoples’ photos all of the time without permission. So it sounds like a bullshit law that can be used to arbitrarily string people up rather than anything actually enforceable or reasonable.
And in general the focus of the photo matters. You don't need permission from random folks who are not recognizable in the background.
Intent also matters. If I post a picture of my kid eating icecream and there's some random dude in the background no court will prosecute that.
If I add a caption identifying the person in the background things might look different.
My problem is that attempts to legally curb this have gross implications for the rights of people to keep informed about ongoings in the world. We have a right to be able to show corrupt cops as much as we do criminals and rioters. We have a right to showcase protests when going well or when they're destructive. We have a right to film stuff like Rittenhouse's situation and use that information to jail or free him of charges.
And any corporation will exploit this citizen desire for 'privacy' and use it as a wedge to strip us of our power as citizens, nevermind to allow some information that is in line with establishment values but disallow information that runs contrary to it's power.
You can't solve all these problems at once.
Censorship - both from the state and monopoly actors in the private sector, is incredibly worrisome.
What would be the worst case scenario is that our privacy is utterly gone AND censorship, citing privacy concerns, never really addresses privacy in a practical way but does help corporations and states manipulate the public discourse and undermine our very democracy.
As far as i'm concerned - even as a privacy advocate - our privacy is gone. We lost this battle. Theere's things we can do to maximize our privacy and make it better but the toothpaste is never going back into the tube.
But this is a moment where censorship is about to be normalized in an extreme way and this is a fight that shouldn't be lost.
if someone in power can bend the law to protect their power, they will.
You would have to justify it anyway and personal rights in Germany always trump the rights of others to create art, for example. You'll find many cases that are about surveillance cameras as well and even there's it's often in favor of the person not wanting to be on camera.
https://dejure.org/dienste/vernetzung/rechtsprechung?Text=VI...
http://lrbw.juris.de/cgi-bin/laender_rechtsprechung/document...
You see this out of Aussies, often, too.
However, there are also penal codes preventing the mere taking of pictures where intimate privacy is affected, i.e. in intimate situations, in your own home, or when you are helpless (i.e. when injured in public).
>German law, for example, generally protects people's privacy (i.e. you are not allowed to take a photo of people without permission, even in public).
So everything from the videos showing Kyle Rittenhouse doing nothing illegal, to Chauvin videos providing evidence that he killed George Floyd wouldn't be allowed in Germany. Got it.
This is an intractable problem and just exists as another lever to arbitrarily punish people.
[1] https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1462758324177444870 or backup: https://www.rowlingindex.org/work/ttfaddr/
[1] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/private-i... This policy is not applicable to media featuring public figures...
I wonder what other behaviours we have forgotten that used to occur? No photos of people in a pub, at a cafe, on vacation. This might make Twitter a less appealing place for the average person.
Imagine if Facebook did this.
I think it’s interesting to instead think about the number of individuals this might help. People being bullied, harassed, doxxed, etc. It could be life changing for them.
Taking down a Karen video shouldn’t be compared with real censorship (i.e of opinions) when these videos are weaponized to ruin lives over a bad day, and serve little other material value.
We are talking about a platform that has had dubious fact check warnings attached to tweets for a year now, which mainly seem to serve to reinforce a false consensus and prevent open debate.
People being bullied, harassed, doxxed, etc are a distraction from this larger issue, and will not benefit from this, because the only ones you ever hear about are people with enough influence and clout to turn being a target into being a public victim.
Sure, if it were fairly enforced, it might. But do we trust Twitter to fairly enforce it? Do they have a transparent, accountable process, with the right to appeal? Do they have a trustworthy track record for making fair decisons?
This would be a nice ticket to fix...
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...
Uh huh. This will be applied unevenly. Pics that violate this that support one political cause will be allowed, pics that violate this that support the opposite will be banned.
Users might consider saying "I do not want my images being public" and can be prohibited before posting.
Taking it down after it's posted is useless, it'll be in caches all over the world and by that time, it's too late.
For example, every reddit post ever posted (or near enough) are scraped in real time (pushbullet, bigquery etc) so the take-downs need to happen before it hits public APIs.
I also think we need to enforce consent, and begin taking action against tech firms - if I did not consent and they allowed it to be published, they should be held to account. They need stronger measures to ensure consent was freely and fairly given.
[0] https://nypost.com/2021/03/24/twitter-censoring-detention-ce...
Whatever we think of this policy, anyone who tweets or re-tweets a photo of an uninvolved person in a breaking news case should be, by their policy, permanently banned (or shadowbanned).
(And also misinformation, like what Spike Lee did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/therootdc/post/spike-le... )