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Comment by laputan_machine | Hacker News Reader

I often think this about Ring / permanent surveillance that exists now. Nobody can even be free in front of their own house without the threat of something ludicrous happening to you and then it being on public record until the end of the internet. It's absolutely wild to me.

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That's the exact reason I just ordered a locally recording doorbell and am finally replaced the last cloud based "smart" device in my home. I found myself actually changing my behavior and not saying certain things to my wife in front of it. The thought that every time I passed my own front door a stranger, that I placed there, was recording me was nauseating.

I had a ring for about one week before I ripped it out and sent it back.

I can’t understand how almost no one realized we went far worse than UK or Singapore’s surveillance state and did it on our own dollar voluntarily.

What's really scary about this, is that it can be edited by anyone before being posted online to make you either look like a victim or an instigator. It's then picked up by the media (which apparently are just influencers or Redditors now). People will always view that initial video as fact, even after the full evidence is posted. This can ruin the rest of your life, the damage has been done.

While editing videos has always been an issue, it wasn't possible to gain notoriety, make money, or instigate racial/class/political/whatever warfare as easily as it is now. You just need to post an edited video and whatever side you want to instigate, you can.

Ring cameras are wired and you can set them up to only turn on when you aren't home. Thats what I do. I also don't have neighbors and live in the woods.

Like it or not, this is just the beginning.

Fairly soon, all human life will be recorded.

There should be a right to be forgotten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

We need a privacy bill of rights.

Until then, based on how it’s going, the EU will lead on this for the foreseeable future so let’s hope they nail it.

American intelligence agencies are complaining and lobbying hard about even the possibility of restriction in buying unlimited amounts of warrantless location tracking data on all their citizens at the moment as if it’s their God given right and without a thought to the monstrosity that could create… so… yea.

I agree that overexposure is a problem, but I can't support censorship of truthful information.

HN/YCombinator does not honor this correctly from a EU law perspective. They don't allow you to delete your content. What they do offer is renaming your account.

I'm salivating for this monster lawsuit once they they have enough EU exposure. It will probably be based in Germany.

@switch007: They are investing in European companies. That's exposure.

@walthamstow: Look up the "Right to erasure" aspect of the GDPR.

(Why am I adding these things as edits? - I was rate-limited by HN/Ycombinator so I can't reply to your individual comments. When trying to post a reply I get the message "please slow down".)

I don't know EU regulations well enough but isn't the ability to change your email address and scrub your about section enough? That would break any traceable links to you.

Does HN have an EU company? If not, why should EU law apply?

I’m mostly pro EU but I’m against countries/unions enforcing their laws beyond their borders.

I live in a GDPR country and I don't really see the problem with HN's approach. They own the information you typed into their website, you own the privacy of your name. Why should they delete information you gave them, rather than just help you anonymise it?

> They own the information you typed into their website

Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case? I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

That would imply to me that the site operator does not own the user-generated content. Otherwise, you'd have a weird "have your cake and eat it too" situation where a site gets all the rights of ownership but none of the responsibilities.

(... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content violates intellectual property or contains PII.)

> Not a lawyer, but is this actually the case?

Generally, no, they have a license, generally a broad, perpetual, non-exclusive license per the conditions attached to use of the site. not ownership. OTOH:

> I thought the core of section 230 was about exactly that - that a site operator does not constitute a "publisher" for everything that is written on their site, if the site is just a "dumb" software that displays content written by the site's users - and therefore can't be made liable for anything written in user-generated content in the way they would be for editoral content.

This is wrong on multiple levels; it specifically does not require that it be ”dumb” (neutral) software, which would have made them a distributor not a publisher under the law without Section 230; it specifically is to allow site operators (and other users) to do things that shape which content is presented without being subject to liability as a publisher.

But that's about liability, not ownership.

> (... this doesn't even touch on the situation where that content contains intellectual property or PII.)

If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

Thanks a lot for that clarification. That actually changed my understanding of section 230: I always thought that the "shaping" of content was some sort of loophole that the section might have more or less accidentally enabled - I wasn't aware that this was its main purpose.

Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

> If its not IP, no one has ownership ; ownership of content only applies to IP of some kind.

(I edited the GP before I saw the reply)

My point was more who is responsible for violations of other IP in UGC - i.e. the classic case of someone uploading a blockbuster movie to YouTube. Would the liability fall on YouTube or the individual user who uploaded the content.

Or, in a similar vein, you post your address/phone number/real name/whatever to a platform, then later want to delete the post again, but the platform doesn't let you. Can you (legally) force the platform to delete the post or not?

However, the fact that both scenarios resulted in years-long, (and still ongoing) debates and in the end, new laws had to be passed to handle them (DMCA and GDPR), shows to me that the whole area seems to be extremely messy and not completely well-defined.

But yeah, the other question is also interesting: If I uploaded some personal project to YouTube (which would constitute IP I believe) and suddenly it goes viral, could Google steal the video and publish it as their own? Good to know here that they can't.

> Considering that we increasingly understand how much power lies in that ability to "shape" distribution of UGC, and how much platforms actively abuse that power, the people wanting to reform/repeal the section just got a whole lot more sympathetic in my view.

I’m curious who you’re referring to as the people wanting to reform/repeal. Most of the discussion on section 230 that I’ve seen in recent years can pretty much be summarized as “I allege that you’re shaping content to reflect a particular political/cultural preference. Therefore you should not be shielded from responsibility for illegal content”—which is a total non-sequitur. But maybe there’s also bee more thoughtful discussion that I’ve missed since I was never really paying that close attention to it.

Really, those people weren’t even looking for reform. They wanted to apply their interpretation of the existing law such that it would lead to a punitive outcome for the sake of retribution.

Yeah, that's the point. Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship, as many do. It gained a ton of popularity during covid because so many were against the government banning public assembly. Yet the only remaining avenues for broad speech censored views that went against the CDC's demands

> [have the government] Create a negative outcome for companies that perform politically biased censorship

Let’s not leave out an important few words.

No, the government does not create the negative outcome. It is simply an act of removing broad protections granted to a social media company from hosting illegal content. When it's clear that the assumption they have little control over the overall content are not true, because the act to censor to politically slant said content.

The risk comes completely from their members and the ones who may sue them

Why has the focus been purely on instances of perceived political bias if this isn’t just a pretext for punishing the wrong type of perceived political bias? Shouldn’t any demonstration of content control cause the same loss of protection (and cause the same fervent calls for loss of protection)? This would include removing illegal content. Removing illegal content, under your theory, should cause a platform to lose protection from hosting illegal content.

Well that's a bit of a chicken and egg. You only get "protection" from accidentally hosting illegal content if you never host any illegal content in the first place?

The idea is that if you have time to shape the slant of your community, you have no excuse for letting illegal content faster

Those ring cameras are actually crazy. The fact that they are so normalized in the BA is kind of disturbing

This lady just moved in next to me. Drives a leased luxury car. Doesn't interact with anyone, she just put up a ring camera (on an apartment door) and doesn't go outside

I absolutely can't stand people who put up all of this cringey privacy invading IOT shit, in a relatively nice area on top of that

In Switzerland those cameras are illegal, since there is a right to privacy for all persons. Security cameras can exist on private land or where the need is deemed to be absolutely necessary (eg, high security or high value areas where it is in the public interest to have a camera) - but filming the street from your house fails these tests. Same for dashcams.

People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

> People like to make this "oh but you're in public so why can't I film you" argument and it's so strange to me that this is something people actively want - to not be allowed privacy from other peoples pictures and recordings.

I don’t find it at all surprising that there’s disagreement about this. You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other. Personal freedom is important and so is personal privacy. Of course there’s going to be controversy and differences from place to place and culture to culture on where the dividing line should exist.

> You have two entirely reasonable and important principles that are butting up against each other

How exactly is being allowed to record someone else in public without their consent an "important principle"? Especially if the non-consenting person is the subject of the recording?

Why should I need your consent in public? Especially, if it’s incidental. If I follow you around all day, I see a problem. If you’re in the background of a video or photo I took of something else, I can’t see an issue.

The important principle is that people should be generally free to do what they want in public if it’s not harming others. It’s natural that it becomes more difficult to decide how to apply that principle when you begin talking about vague notions of harm, or potential harm, or harm that’s dependent on the personality or opinions of the person potentially being harmed.

Edit: I meant for this to be a reply to the parent comment.

There are degrees to this, going up to some random person and photographing their face is more egregious than photographing a friend with the random person in the background

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