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Comment by trogdor | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, it’s legal to film people in public in the US without their consent. But it’s also shitty.

I don’t think that it’s always shitty to film people in public without their consent. This is not a black and white issue.

Do you feel that consent should be obtained from everyone who is visible in any video taken outdoors, regardless of whether those people are the intended subject of the video? Do you have a consent problem with surveillance videos? How about videos captured on car dash cameras?

Let’s say you are at a tourist attraction, capturing a video of the attraction. Another visitor asks that you stop filming, because they don’t want to be in your video. Dickish to continue? I’m not so sure.

It’s easy to say “don’t be a dick,” but that statement sidesteps the reality that reasonable people can (and do) disagree about what that means.

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> Do you feel that consent should be obtained from everyone who is visible in any video taken outdoors

It's a spectrum.

When someone is the subject of your video, like the AC/DC person in the article, then YES, you are a shitty person if you post that for the world to see without their permission.

The entire point of my comment is that it’s a spectrum.

… and yet there are still counter-examples: Candid photography[1] has long been recognized as art, and I wouldn't feel that the photographer is a "shitty person" for trying to capture a view of the world not affected by knowledge that the camera is trained on them. (And permission after the fact is not always possible. Nor necessary, even to avoid be "shitty".)

Photo-journalism, particularly of politicians, would be greatly harmed by a permission requirement: is a journalist a shitty person for reporting the truth, even truths that a politician might not like? (And let's say it's something public, like capturing a politician giving a public speech that would appear to be whipping a crowd into a mob, not tabloid/paparazzi type stuff.) Someone photographing or videotaping police brutality?

Intent, I think, is what matters in determining if any one photo/capture is "shitty"; there are instances where you can be a good person while creating photos or videos that might be very detrimental to the subject. Some of the examples from TFA are good examples: creators looking to find people on the street to make a fool of.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candid_photography#As_an_art_f...

[2]: (I'd perhaps also add the last time I surreptitiously recorded someone was because the person was issuing death threats to those around him. AITA? But there are other, more artistic or journalistic cases that I think also have merit, which is why this is a footnote.)

> … and yet there are still counter-examples: Candid photography[1] has long been recognized as art, and I wouldn't feel that the photographer is a "shitty person" for trying to capture a view of the world not affected by knowledge that the camera is trained on them. (And permission after the fact is not always possible. Nor necessary, even to avoid be "shitty".)

I think if the picture/video is to be posted online or in a gallery, the person in the picture has a right to say how their likeness is being used, regardless of context. If someone's in the background of a video a I would say it's not as relevant, unless the background person becomes the subject unintentionally (as often seen in fail videos).

Surveillance is a different matter. You are notified you're entering a building with cameras, and those also aren't streamed online or displayed publicly.

As for public figures: there's usually separate laws for such things for public figures, AFAIK

TikToker: Can you name 3 AC/DC songs?

Fan: How about... "Ballbreaker" ?

(Disclaimer: this story is fiction – and I'm sure that AC/DC do not actually advocate violence against most TikTokers.)

I don't think the point is "family video." I think the point is "viral tik tok video." And it seems like we've been here before. Monetized entertainment is monetized entertainment.

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-have-to-sign-a-waiver-or-other-...

There's a reason that appearance releases are a thing.

Legally, I believe the only time you actually need a model release is if you are going to use the image in advertising. I am not a lawyer, and if you want the real answer you should probably ask one. But the answers to that quora question look wrong to me. Note that I am talking about the US, the rules may be different elsewhere.

> Do you have a consent problem with surveillance videos?

Ubiquitous CCTV cameras certainly bring issues of privacy, as well as what they should be used for.

One example is Smart Streetlights, which were initially promoted as energy saving lights that would help to measure and manage traffic and pollution, but quickly turned into dragnet police surveillance systems, initially for solving violent crimes but ultimately including property crimes such as vandalism, illegal dumping, and destruction of city property[1], and for protest surveillance [2].

[1] https://voiceofsandiego.org/2020/02/03/the-mission-creep-of-...

[2] https://mashable.com/article/police-surveil-black-lives-matt...

License plate cameras tend to have similar mission creep - they start out for parking enforcement or for red light tickets and turn into a system for tracking citizens whenever and wherever they drive.

In Japan, it’s been common practice to blur out the faces of anyone who hasn’t given consent in a photo/video. This applies to crowds as well. This can be an easy way to always avoid being a dick.

The biggest problem I have with those tiktokers is that they will ruin filming in public for the rest of us, as people will demand some kind of radical law prohibiting it.

I am totally fine with the distinction that is enshrined in law in many places around the world: you can record everything in public, but you cannot publish what you recorded without consent.

The issue is that we have two extremes (as it often happens) that either react to the camera as if it's the devil eating their souls and freak out, or we have the tiktokers basically ignoring the second part (no publication without consent).

>react to the camera as if it's the devil eating their souls and freak out

The problem is, if they politely ask someone to stop filming them, it won't have any effect.

I find that when people present these ethical gray areas about a given behavior, they always conclude that it's best to allow the behavior to continue, the (false) premise being that doing so is the ethically neutral position to take. It's a neat little rhetorical trick used to rationalize all kinds of things.

If the recording-in-public is for commercial purposes, yes I want to be asked for consent if for no other reason than to demand my slice of the pie.

And yes, posting to TikTok for "clout" is "commercial purposes". There are many drone pilots who found out the expensive way that posting drone footage on YouTube resulted in fines/prosecutions under commercial drone operation regulations.

I didn't say it was a black and white issue. I said it was an ethical issue, and like all ethical issues, there is a very wide spectrum of what fits, what doesn't, and what's grey area.

I can think of reasons why one might record a stranger in public, or a stranger might end up in a recording, but I thought it was pretty clear from the article that we're not talking about that—we're talking about content creators (any person making content) filming strangers without consent so they can create content using those strangers. These other things you're talking about are irrelevant to that conversation.

IMO it's fine if you keep the video strictly to yourself and don't share it with third-parties or feed it as training material to the panopticon.

That is, you can film a crowd I'm part of; just keep it off google drive, whatsapp, tiktok, facebook, and youtube.

The reason so many conflate the two is because for most people they are not distinct activities.

I'm a little less convinced that "crowd shots" count in this discussion.

When some jerk goes up to a girl with the intent to humiliate her for TikTok lulz by asking her to name 3 ACDC songs, that video no only should never be "shared with 3rd parties", but should never even be made in the first place.

On the other hand, I wouldn't even think about asking your consent to post a crowd pan shot of a music festival with hundreds (or thousands) of people in shot. And unless you happened to be one of the people right behind me and obviously recognisable in the clip, I'd consider you insane if you objected or asked me to take it down.

I've not fully thought this through, but there's a big difference between "active engagement" with a specific person like the TikTok jerk, and passive engagement like "look at the crowd here at SXSW!" And there's a hard line in the sand about the TikTok jerk's intentions of hoping to humiliate people publicly.

If that TikTok jerk had caught me on a bad day as I was coming back to my partner while he was pulling that shit, he'd probably be buying a new microphone and camera after I'd stomped them...

If things end up online (and everything recorded by a modern cam will end up online at least at one of Google, Apple, FB, or MS) this is not OK. You can't control what those companies do with the data. If you don't like your life ending up in the cloud nobody may film you without your consent. There is not much room for discussion. (Maybe if the recordings would be done with offline devices and you would get written guaranties that the recording never gets onto an networked computer, but who could promise this in today's world?)

> There is not much room for discussion

And yet here we are. You’re not in charge, and telling other people what they are and aren’t allowed to do just to meet some arbitrary desire of yours is being a dick. Do you really expect everyone not to take pictures and videos of games you’re at? Museums you’re in? Concerts you attend? Come on.

Thankfully I'm in the EU.

It's my right to demand that.

(This does not mean that everybody conforms to the law. But people that don't would be at least liable for damages.)

Edit, to clarify: Of course you can film in public. But you're required to cut out people who didn't give explicit consent before showing the material in public or handing it over to third parties.

No it isn’t (there are similar laws in at least France and Italy, and a much broader one in the UK).

All of this delightful nuance goes to my previous point; there’s plenty to debate and discuss here and the whole idea of an absolute right to privacy in public is comical.

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/kunsturhg/__23.html

There is no "absolute right to privacy in public", of course.

But distributing or handing over such material is limited and requires usually consent.

Please pay special attention to the second sentence of the cited paragraph.

No it doesn’t. That consent is gated around violating their legitimate purpose (see the other words in that second paragraph). So in general just posting stuff/uploading to TikTok/facebook/etc does not require consent and you don’t have a right to have it taken down without specific cause.

No, that's wrong.

We're talking here about rights that are derived directly form the first sentence of the German constitution!

Such right is very strong. Only in exceptional cases it can be overruled by other constitutional rights.

Details can be found for example here: https://www.prigge-recht.de/wann-darf-ich-bilder-von-anderen...

You should tell your Supreme Court that, they just ruled that street photography is constitutionally protected art.

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