The rise of the camera launched a fight to protect Gilded Age privacy
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it before it gets much worse.
Ancient Egyptians and Romans would seem to have relished such a problem.
Allowing "escape your past" is generally not socially desirable.
I say 120 years because I believe the Kodak Brownie No. 2 was the inflection point. Other film cameras existed before that point, but did not have user-replaceable film - you would return the whole camera to Kodak and they'd send you back prints and a new camera.
Thus, before the Brownie No. 2, the camera's owner had never posessed the negative itself. For the first time, an indisputably real account of an event could be reproduced over and over, on demand, with a low financial barrier to entry, and in any shape or size the negative's owner could imagine.
Obviously, the internet age has come with its own staggering paradigm shifts. Sure, private information may not be more sensitive than it ever was. But, it is easier than ever before to distribute it for profit.
1. Neighbor X claims they saw {embarrassing thing}
2. Neighbor X has objective proof that the event occurred
3. Here's a picture of the event
4. Here's a picture which is endlessly duplicable and broadcastable
I honestly don't care even a little if I happen to appear in (or even are the subject of) a random photo taken by a regular person. I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated snapshot/video.
The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
Yes, I know they may upload it to Facebook and such, where it is weaponized. That does bother me, but I choose to ignore that part except to make sure that my friends and family don't do it.
This is where likeness rights come into place. A commercial entity can't use your image as an endorsement of their product or in marketing materials without your consent, which is why many production companies err on the side of making sure they vet every face in every image of their marketing material.
> The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
As you said in the next paragraph, this is impossible to prevent without stripping people of their copyrights to use their work however they please, including by sharing on social media or uploading to a extremely value-oriented service (like Google Photos) that only provides their services for free/cheap because of the value they get from being able to "improve the product" using user content.
I don't see how likeness rights apply. I'm not talking about my image being used in marketing materials.
> this is impossible to prevent without stripping people of their copyrights to use their work
That's not a copyright issue. Copyright allows you to restrict how others use your works, it says nothing about how you use your works.
I think you're talking about free speech rights here, and free speech rights have never been, will never be, and shouldn't be, absolute. There are many cases where those rights (like all rights) need to be balanced against other contradictory rights.
Most of us, “of a certain age,” can remember Christoff’s smiling face, on the Taster’s Choice labels, for years.
…which is a million times more damaging to you personally than Coca-Cola knowing you are(n’t) an attractive target to advertise to.
What is more harmful to you: a half-naked photo of you going viral, or your last 100 gas tank refills logged into an image database?
The latter.
Why exactly would a "half naked image" of me go viral anyway?
what does weaponizing mean here? Because i do believe it is a hypothetical threat that most don't actually see as a real threat. The only scenario is that it acts as evidence for you being in a specific location/time, when it is inconvenient for you to admit to being there.
It means manipulating into buying staff you don't need, i.e., targeted ads.
There's a reason they spend so much on things like facial recognition, they will take more money from you than they spend.
In another of today's HN stories, 'For advertising: Firefox now collects user data by default', I made almost the same point. If a majority of the citizenry is indifferent and or sees no threat then the politics will not change, no new laws or regulations will be introduced.
Moreover, with no concerted opposition or action the status quo will only be reinforced—thus, by default, those who've vested interests gain additional political power to further ensure there's no change.
Indifference is the enemy of democracy.
Manipulating possible futures, including financial.
imagine if you're a closeted homosexual caught in a photo kissing another member of the same sex, and you live in a locality where that puts your life in danger. imagine you live in a theocracy and someone catches you without your head scarf.
THAT is weaponization.
Your examples aren't wrong but the stakes of losing control of our data are so much higher than you're imagining.
Seems dangerous
"I have nothing to hide" makes sense to me - except sometimes you don't know what you have to hide, or it can change after the fact
The examples I used are ones that affect pretty much everybody and, more importantly, are directly relevant to me. Since I was commenting about my own personal situation, I thought it prudent to limit my response to that subset.
But you're right -- there are many layers to this onion, and some are far worse than others.
The only examples I can think of is auto insurers buying your vehicle usage data, and creditors buying your borrowing data. I don’t know if cameras or the Internet has anything to do with either case.
And then there are the really creepy services. There was a service not long ago in Russia that would allow you to upload a picture of any woman you saw on the street. They would identify the face (via VK) and provide you with their contact and job information. Totally creepy. Totally abusive. But easily done with basic tech.
if this results in lower insurance for those who are deemed to be healthier due to exercises, then it's a good outcome. Pricing insurance more accurately is almost always a good outcome.
And those deemed at risk are not only people skipping jogging.
As you say, while there's probably some correlation between cycling and healthy activity in general, it's probably also an activity--depending on local infrastructure and where you cycle--that by itself adds risk of injury.
Varying the premiums across the insured population adds some fairness to the equation, but the moment it starts actually culling members of said population through outrageous pricing, it is just plain cheating.
Meanwhile in the US if you get kicked off your medical insurance with any kind of chronic illness then you either pay out the ass for basic treatment or die.
The problem with medical insurance is that it's a flawed system in the US. Everybody gets sick, it's a near 100% chance guarantee, esp. as you age.
Therefore, medical "insurance" should not be insurance, but should be a fund. It should be paid into by all taxpayers at some rate proportional to their income (like VAT), and then the fund goes to fund _all_ non-elective medical procedures.
Insurance for medical should be for _premium_ facilities, like private rooms, private nurses etc. Not for the treatment.
That is the case. If your house is currently on fire, no one will insure you. What are you doing about this awful situation?
> Therefore, medical "insurance" should not be insurance, but should be a fund. It should be paid into by all taxpayers at some rate proportional to their income (like VAT), and then the fund goes to fund _all_ non-elective medical procedures.
You seem to be extremely US-centric. You can't differentiate between "how the US does insurance" and "fundamental truths about insurance". This discussion is not just a proxy for an incredibly well-worn, and separate, conversation on US healthcare.
in reality, it'll result in higher insurance for those who are deemed unhealthy, or simply at risk. As someone said already, maybe joggers suddenly get lower premiums and bikers (especially in biker unfriendly cities) get higher ones. Maybe you end up paying even more if you bench more at a gym than the "recommended amount". Maybe they collaborate with certain fitness companies and will charge you less if you click an affiliate link to buy this health product.
The possibilities here are endless, and this is just for one aspect of life. This can in theory work with a benevolent leadership, but that ship sailed decades ago.
Seems like gender technically wouldnt be a blocker, was that a product choice, or a marketing choice?
The entire junk debt collection industry.
DeleteMe is a product that was made in response to the productization of PII, so that's an interesting footnote in this conversation as well.
Photographic film is remarkable in that way - you can screw with the print, but the thing that's actually captured on the film isn't easy to manipulate once it's been developed.
I can only imagine the trickery necessary to make this work but the historical record is clear that negatives were definitely altered.
One BIG difference between high school and ordinary life is that high school is filled with a bunch of adolescents who are forced to be in a place where there isn't much to do for fun other than gossip about the other adolescents. Given that adolescence is a time when humans are maximally embarrassing and maximally interested in other adolescents' embarrassment, I don't think it's a good model for general life.
People in small towns and villages today do not act like high schoolers, and they are perfectly capable of keeping secrets from each other. You don't need a legally enshrined right to privacy when your most dangerous threat model is Fred down the street who is a nosy twerp.
it's personal cameras or from the muni/gov?
Or further back: "Zog, why you paint other head on cave-wall of fertility goddess!?"
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
[1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
A multitude of successful cryptocurrency rugpulls has shown that technology can indeed be ouroboric, with no actual social benefit.
I do get GP's broader argument, that every generation shakes its fist at the cloud, and we're no different (though this time, we do have a "cloud" to shake our fists at!)
However, your argument resonated with me. Growing up, I observed that newer tech was often superior (e.g. DOS --> Windows) and competing by delivering superior value to the end-user. Of late, it feels like companies are reading the financial tea-leaves and competing by delivering increasing gains to Wall Street.
""" The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. """
AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means.
None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.
Article form ~10yr ago: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy
It does give me hope that we'll hammer out some ethical and legal structure, eventually, and, also, that folks will learn to live in the new world.
9 (13) days ago. 46 points. 8-ish comments.
7 days ago
Am I the only one who finds the phrase "manually photoshopped" in an article about the late 1800s to early 1900s amusingly anochronistic? How about "manually doctored" or even "altered"?
That would be a fascinating artifact of "skeumorphic" software naming.
You have a reasonable right to privacy, e.g., in your home.
We practically can't expect people to do without a smartphone. It's how people pay bills, bank, access weather information, etc. And since it's the most-used path, it's also the best-maintained path. Non-smartphone alternatives have already rotted. Have you tried calling into half of those bills you pay via QR code instead of just scanning the code? Try it sometime.
Instead of telling people to just go live on a mountain monastery in Tibet, we could instead simply eat our cake AND have it by just regulating this stuff. Pass privacy laws. Fine people who break them. Samsung, Google, etc will comply rather than not continue to bathe in our ad revenue.
We don’t even see the TV’s home screen. Just power on the Xbox/Apple TV/whatever and HDMI CEC turns everything on and sets inputs.
LG is notorious for this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/lg-sm...
In the end, it would appear that you are mixing a little bit of truth with a whole lot of urban legend.
I believe parent's point is: no, one cannot. One cannot live in a (modern Western urban) society and not have a smartphone.
The people who do are now living in a different society, where, among other things:
- they have to plan to stop at a bank to take out physical cash
- they have to schedule their days in an entirely different method from their peers with smartphones
- they are less connected to opportunities and access to government and private services because those services come via smart devices and assume smart device ownership
Not to put too fine a point on it: there are restaurants that give you a QR code instead of a paper menu now. Are you and I living in the same society if I can order food there and you can't?
I think we need to stop calling things "not possible" just because they take effort and lifestyle changes to accomplish.
Perhaps we are just quibbling on definitions if we're arguing about whether being homeless counts as living in the same society as those with a permanent address.
The meta point is: government regulates housing because it's something "everybody" (modulo outliers) does: live in a house. If "everybody" (modulo outliers) owns a smartphone and smartphone ownership is assumed for full societal participation... We probably need to regulate it.
This is like the recycling debate all over again. Fundamentally we agree with you; littering is bad, the diminishing of privacy is bad, and none of us should feel hopeless about a situation we are capable of changing.
But consider the average person, not me or you or the hackers. Someone who opts for convenience, not "mindful engagement" for the slightest of interactions with the world. They do not care. Fundamentally they cannot be made to care, even if we show them posters of the Earth burning or make them hear about the Snowden leaks. They consider themselves to be powerless, and will not consider an alternative unless it is as convenient as what they're addicted to now. They're not going to buy respectful TVs because they're not the cheap ones. They're not going to buy respectful phones because it doesn't have the little Apple logo on the back that their friends love so much. The average person literally cannot be made to care unless we make privacy-respecting software easier to use than spyware.
This point is key.
I don't use an Android instead of a Pinephone because I don't care. I use an Android because Pinephone sucks right now, and I can't be hacking on the device I need to rely on to schedule my bank payments and call the emergency services if I fall in a ravine. That device has to be five-nines trustworthy.
The solution is going to have to be make Pinephone suck less. That's the only way to mass adoption and actually changing the landscape.
Music piracy didn't get its back broken by a sudden global attack of conscience. It got its back broken by iTunes making it more convenient to get music-to-portable-device than running a torrent server.
Huh? Music piracy is easier and better now than it ever has been. Every music label releases all their music, officially and for free, on YouTube. You can just download it directly from the official source.
It's like Napster, if every music publisher had maintained an official account offering every song they owned, and paid commercial services to ensure that their Napster presence was up to date.
Forget the average person - even as a technically adept person who has tried to "mindfully engage" with technology and minimize his use of it as much as is reasonably possible, the way our societies in the west are structured are making it increasingly difficult to participate in the world without plugging yourself into the surveillance borg. Examples abound even in this thread - QR codes to order food; needing to ask concierge to call you a Lyft because taxis are nonexistent in the neighbourhood and you aren't carrying a smartphone.
There is so much friction involved in living life with minimal technology that you are placing yourself at a significant disadvantage and living your life less efficiently than others by needing to make compromises or forego certain amenities entirely. While it is possible to live life like this and eschew such creature comforts, it becomes exhausting after several years of doing so, and there is no indication that the tides will turn or the winds will begin blowing in the other direction. You can continue swimming upstream for naught and at great disadvantage to yourself, but it will not change the direction of the current. If anything, the pandemic and work-from-home has only accelerated the trend, with the invasion of Internet-connected surveillance devices into one's private quarters now made mandatory in order to participate in the workforce.
> needing to ask concierge to call you a Lyft
Considering this was also necessary before smartphones existed, I'm not sure why it's supposed to be a problem now.
I think the drive for "privacy respect" in devices should really be an effort to push manufacturers toward making devices that work without Internet-connectivity. I think everybody technical who cares about privacy should beat this drum to all their friends, family, etc, to vote with their wallets.
Standalone devices make a stronger privacy guarantee than the alternative.
"Connected" devices that offer "privacy" rely on the compliance of the companies who run the servers for the devices. It also means they can't get breached, either.
https://standards.ieee.org/beyond-standards/ieee-802-11bf-ai...
*in the US that is. Basically everywhere else, esp. Europe, has been moving into the complete opposite direction here. There is _more_ privacy rights - and recourse, like the right to delete - then there has been at any point in the past.
The geographical naming rights is one such thing. Anybody anywhere can make any kind of cheese, but one cannot say the cheese is parmesian (or any other given example) cheese without being located in a certain region. There was a famouse case where a cheese maker in itally opened a new factory on the other sside of town which happened to be across the lambardi river, and suddenly they were no longer able to say that cheese was whatever kind of cheese...
That is just one example of many... why legal fictions are bad arguments in Europe, and don't work internationally. One cannot demand other people unsee things they have seen (wipe their brain memory), and so it goes it's equally unjust to demand other people delete photos of them they have seen and recorded in photos.
It's a lot more nuanced than that, and in some cases the privacy ideas are fully justified, but you get the idea.... there cannot be absolutism in either direction.
should they not have the right to protect their trademark?
What does that mean? What is a legal fuction?
Since many of us grew up before and then after the Internet, we kind of instinctively get what application functionality needs the Internet, what functionality doesn't, what gets written to the Internet, what gets read from the Internet and so on. Younger computer/phone users don't get this at all. My 11 year old has no mental picture of why X requires Internet and Y doesn't require Internet. She doesn't understand the concept of Data A is stored on-device, and Data B is stored on the Internet. And honestly, I'm even having a harder and harder time explaining it. Tech applications have totally blurred and grayed the previously black-and-white line.
Hard disagree. The only unreasonable expectation is that you could go out in public and not be seen at all. It is entirely reasonable to expect not to be tracked, doxxed, etc.
I would like to put the brakes on the idea that just because we can do something, it is okay to do it. The law was written when computers, networking, smartphones, and high resolution digital cameras did not exist. We could easily conclude that every bit of surveillance technology that did not exist in e.g. 1950 is illegal until explicitly permitted by law. Certain organizations would like to gaslight us into thinking that is impossible, that the cat is out of the bag so to speak. I do not agree. We can do it.
as the article shows, according to the law of the time there was no right to privacy, and photos were not protected until the public protested and the laws were changed.
likewise today any expectation of privacy is a matter of opinion. just because laws do not sufficiently protect our privacy, does not mean that we should give up any expectation of privacy. on the contrary, we need to demand better protection from out lawmakers. vote accordingly