This feels like it has the potential to be a "this is why we can't have nice things" outcome even though I don't think the app author is doing anything wrong.
If it's a problem as soon as the average American starts using something, it's probably better if those resources stop being made available period.
There's a pretty big difference between using it for its intended purpose (ie. monitoring traffic), and the alleged behavior that the department of transportation was opposed to.
>Office of Legal Affairs recently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Morry Kolman, the artist behind the project, charging that the TCP "encourages pedestrians to violate NYC traffic rules and engage in dangerous behavior."
What's the point of having it public then? The department of transportation is already using that data for monitoring traffic so there's zero need for anyone else to replicate their work. The value in making that data public isn't so that Joe Average can track traffic volume over time just like the DoT is already doing. It's for transparency and so that the public can find new and innovative uses for the information our tax money is already being spent on gathering.
There's no point if we're not allowed to use that data in new ways and we don't need the kind of "transparency" that only applies as long as the public isn't looking.
If a specific use is actually dangerous then that can be dealt with on a case by case basis, and it's arguable that they were right to send a cease and desist letter to this website, but making the data itself unavailable over it would be an overreaction
SeriousCompany: "Look how cool and in tune we are with the public, here's this resource that you can all use. High five! [...] Oh, wait, no, what you're doing is bad for our image... No, stop, we didn't mean for you to do... No, don't enjoy it that way... Wait, stop, we didn't think of that at all! Oh, god no you're using it to post Amogus Porn! SHUT IT DOWN!!!"
Because it prompts a serious question: why are taxpayers paying for this?
For entertainment. I'm not saying it's a good reason. But I could absolutely see "why are we paying millions of dollars to fund someone's Tik Tok" play well in an election.
But there is a cost. If it’s not used by 90% of voters, and its trivially use is made known to 60% of them, you have the votes to reällocate those funds.
> footage that those cameras capture already belongs to the taxpayers. They are a public record (although short lived since it doesn't look like the government is saving the footage). The taxpayers should have easy access to their own records and they should have the freedom to make use of those records
They are a public record because we make them public. And taxpayers fund plenty of non-public information collection. That you wouldn’t vote for something doesn’t make it electoral impossible (nor even not good politics).
It's an open resource, sure, but the provider of the resource can still set limits on its use, even after it's been available for some time. Often that includes things like "don't use our free resource to make yourself money".
That seems like an entirely reasonable request to me?
Something being freely available does not inherently grant you the right to use it however you'd like. It's pretty unhelpful to conflate the two things.
It is unfair for SeriousCompany to pretend that resources it releases to the public (usually as a PR move or to advertise a paid product) must flatter their motives and the narrow confines of what they envisioned the public might use them for. That is wishing a free resource had a license when it only has a social contract. If the provider could set limits, it would no longer be free.
And no, that's not unfair, that's absolutely within their rights, as the provider of said thing. What's unfair is willfully taking advantage of a free resource in ways that are explicitly against the reasons the provider is providing the thing in the first place. That's just place malice at that point.
After all, a license is just a social contact that can actually be enforced. I would argue the world would be a far better place if people didn't abuse the unenforceable nature of what you're calling "just a social contract".
Personally I do find it useful to be able to glance at the NYC traffic cams as a supplement to traffic maps, not only because having an actual visual on the traffic can help me decide on a driving route better than red or green map lines or a routing algorithm I know will take me on an inferior path to “avoid” perceived traffic, but also because the cameras pick up other nearby stuff. I like to go on runs over the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s so swarmed with tourists most of the time that I’ll check the DOT cameras so I can see if the pedestrian path is clear enough to run on without being clotheslined by a selfie stick.
I also spend a lot of time north of the city, and the state highway traffic cams are great for checking the plowing status during/after winter storms before setting off for a trip.
Regular people have been using it for decades, though? Scrolling through the comments here are plenty of people who have discovered and put these cameras to use in their daily lives.
Something being freely provided does not inherently grant consumers the right to do with it whatever they please. The producers, being the one freely providing the things, seem well within their rights to set limits on its usage, no? Sure, sometimes things are freely produced with the express point being that they can be used without limitations, but this isn't an inherent property of the thing being freely available.
I mean, why else do we have so many different open source licensing models?
Average American probably won't be using it.
This seems to be the hole in Kant's categorical imperative[0] - plenty of useful things fail the test of universality, because there isn't one class, or two classes, but three classes of people: those who find some use for a thing, those who don't and thus don't care, and then those who have no use for the thing but don't like it anyway. And in the past century or so, thanks to the role of mass media, that third class is ruling the world.
And so...
> but the moment regular folks start getting in on the fun and they post a pic of themselves being surveilled on twitter suddenly it's time to shut everything down?
Yes, it is. It's how this has been playing out time and again - once the attention seekers, and people with overactive imagination wrt. dystopias, and maybe the few with some actually reasonable objections join forces, it's better to shut the thing down as soon as possible, to minimize the amount of time your name can be found on the front pages of major newspapers. At that point, there's little hope to talk things out and perhaps rescue the project in some form - outraged public does not do calm or rational, and if you somehow survive the first couple days and the public still cares, you're destined to become a new ball in the political pinball machine. With your name or life on the line, it's usually much easier to cut your losses than to stand on principle, especially for something that's inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
One by one, we're losing nice things - not as much because they're abused, but mostly because there's always some performative complainers ready to make a scene. We won't be getting nice things back until our cultural immunity catches up, until we inoculate ourselves against the whining.
See also, [1] and [2].
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
[1] - Cardinal Richelieu's "Give me six lines", though the (apparently) more accurate version from https://history.stackexchange.com/a/28484 is even better: "with two lines of a man's handwriting, an accusation could be made against the most innocent, because the business can be interpreted in such a way, that one can easily find what one wishes." More boring than malevolent, and thus that much more real; it reads like a HN comment.
[2] - Disney's Tomorrowland is, in a way, a commentary on this phenomenon; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405210 is, in a way, a commentary on that.
I found the dude that ran it and emailed back and forth with him for a few years. They made excuses about how it is an IT issue.
An ego issue
What is interesting to me is that the public access to the cameras has been blocked a few months after the war in Ukraine started. For a few months I could watch the large convoys of equipment going towards Ukraine, and my personal theory is that so did the MoD of Russia. I haven't seen any reports about that, just my personal observation.
Or just block it i guess.
My county has traffic cameras available online, though it's only static images updated once a minute or so. It's not that great but I still appreciate it, especially during winter weather. Every now and then if the weather seems bad I check the cameras to see what the roads look like before I head out. It's not a big deal, but I'd be a little annoyed if they took away public access because someone was trying to make some sort of statement or game out of them.
Thinking about it in terms of technology — during the pandemic the schools bought a million iPads. They also run a giant hospital system, the largest police and fire departments in the country, etc.
The net result is administration of a vast, sprawling (both horizontal and vertical) bureaucracy is complex, and the cogs in the wheel of that bureaucracy are simultaneously in your face and detached from reality. So you have a group of attorneys who see a threat in people posing in front of a camera.
Having a semi automated way of doing that would be far more irritating for them.
Of course, it'll be used, but that's just a bad, bad argument at any level.
It's a bad argument as it ends up putting the blame on the wrong party.
Like I said in another part of this thread: we should not be confounding "freely available" with "free to use without limitation". The various forms of open source licensing are testament to this concept: some things are indeed freely offered; others stipulate that you can't use them to make money without also offering your source code freely, etc. In both cases, the code is offered freely, but in the latter case, you're not legally allowed to use it without limitation.
Public information is often taken down because it can't be limited in such ways, and it relies on an honor system of sorts. Once people stop being honorable, there is no other choice but to take the resource away. The fault there absolutely rests with the individuals that have violated the implicit honor system.
It's pretty clear that the providers of a key piece of their endeavor aren't happy with them using the public infrastructure in this way. Is it not dishonorable to go against someone's wishes when they're providing something charitable?
Both of these are valid arguments, which you seem to discount out of hand, as if the provider's concerns are inherently invalid.
Let me flip the question: should anyone who captures an image of you in a public setting be free to monetize your likeness? If you are arguing that the provider's concerns and wishes are irrelevant, would that not also apply to every person who leaves the privacy of their own homes? That they, too, would have absolutely no say in how their likeness in public settings is used?
I feel like we've already established a precedent that yes, you should have some say in how your likeness is used, even when it's captured in settings where you are freely putting it on display in public.
Why does this not apply to other resources that are just as freely given?
And banning pictures is a bad way to keep people out of traffic.
As to your flip... it really doesn't make sense to me. This art project gives people control of their own images! The city is trying to stop them from controlling their own images.
Saying the provider's wishes don't matter (which is a pretty strong exaggeration of what I said) does not even resemble saying the subject's wishes don't matter.
To follow your logic in that case is to argue that you should have no control over how your likeness is used once you provide it to the public by simply being in public.
This is nonsense. The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
It is not unreasonable for NYCDOT to ask that people not use their traffic cameras to take selfies. Encouraging people to flout those wishes, even in the name of "art", is to encourage a society that does not respect other people's wishes.
> when you're in public, you are the provider
I see.
I think we should draw a distinction between information provided on purpose or not. And other distinctions based on who is in the information. So I see your point now, but I think the calculation goes differently because my argument is not nearly that simple nor entirely focused on that specific aspect.
You have control over your likeness because it's your likeness. If you provide someone else's likeness, you deserve much less control. If they want to control it, you deserve even less.
> The provider of the information being collected should generally have some say in how that data is used; and if we want a respectful and kind society, we should respect those wishes so long as they are not unreasonable.
I'd give a lot more leeway for going against the wishes of the provider in particular. I don't think they should get a very privileged position. It's not burdening them, and it's not their personal information. They can ask but I don't think polite society requires agreeing in this case. It's nice of them to be worried about other people's safety but it's a pretty minor safety issue and the person walking around is the one who gets to make the decisions about their own safety.
Your likeness, on the other hand, is freely given to all observers, at no real cost or effort to yourself. You just are, and it is. In fact, you touch on this when you talk about "burden" on the provider.
NYCDOT might not be providing their personal information, but effort and cost is required to maintain this infrastructure, and I think the effort begets respect, at the very least.
While I agree that someone should always have some level of input into how their likeness is used, because it truly is no burden on them to provide it, I think respectively less weight should be given to it. I think the best effort should still be given to respecting a person's wishes when it comes to their likeness, of course, but perhaps comparatively less than when someone intentionally shares something that took effort to create.
So it appears in fact I agree with your logic, but have somehow arrived at the opposite conclusion. Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
> Perhaps because I consider "burden" more broadly than just the marginal effort of supporting an additional viewer of a camera feed?
The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
I don't think you can amortize "burden" across the number of consumers like that. If you want to take that approach, then you also seem to be arguing that the more people who see you in public, the less your likeness is worth--but I think empirically the opposite is true.
> Control over your own likeness is not "burden", but it's important too, and in this situation I would say it's orders of magnitude more impactful and important than the server costs of a few seconds of viewing.
But, why? If the marginal cost of someone taking a picture of you is next to nothing, why is control over that more impactful and important than server costs, for the same duration of viewing? If the marginal burden of someone viewing your likeness is approximately 0, and you're weighting the producer's preferences by that marginal cost (below), does that also not imply that the more people who see your likeness, the less your wish for control over your own likeness matters?
> The reason they set it up is not for selfies, so I think the marginal cost of selfies is the right metric. But even if we look at total burden to set up the system, that's divided over a ton of users, so the person taking a selfie is still looking at a minuscule fraction of it.
Again, I think this is the wrong way of weighting it. I think the preferences in general are an indivisible quantity, and the same regardless of the number of people must decide whether or not to respect those preferences. It's a preference, and each potential consumer must decide for themselves whether or not to respect those preferences. Having more consumers does not "cheapen" the weight of a producer's preferences for the next marginal consumer.
A model in which you weight preferences by marginal burden subsequently cheapens all preferences based on the number of potential consumers of the thing you're sharing. This makes no sense, and empirically--as in the case of "control over your own likeness"--more consumers seems to make that preference even more important. By amortizing the weight of preferences across the pool of potential consumers, you're essentially arguing that if your likeness were to be made available to everyone, for free, your own preferences regarding control of your likeness would become irrelevant.
I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
> I don't necessarily think that all preferences are equal, but I also bias towards weighing everyone's preferences as worth respecting, unless there's a compelling reason to assign more or less weight to those preferences. For example, when preferences are legally protected or morally aligned, I tend to weight them more; while preferences that are simply asinine or I consider to be immoral are similarly downweighted. I don't feel like this is a radical viewpoint, though?
When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it. At least as far as the rights of the entity making the broadcast go. So I do find the disconnect somewhat asinine. And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
But now you're just making an arbitrary distinction? That seems suspicious.
> When there is a public broadcast, I think the right to watch it should automatically be bundled with the right to take pictures of it.
You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you. You might disagree with the legal system, but that does not give you the right to disregard it.
> And when someone is just showing me factual content, I don't particularly care about their preferences as a default, just their burden.
Your likeness is also "just factual content", so by this logic, no one should care about any of your preferences regarding it. Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
That's pretty anti-social.
Maybe? I don't think it's very arbitrary.
> You might, but there are numerous cases where this is illegal, which means the legal system disagrees with you.
Situations like what? Time-shifting is very well established as legal.
> Your likeness is also "just factual content",
No it's not. There are moral rights and privacy rights involved.
> Your only way to resolve this contradiction is apparently to arbitrarily define the things where you think preferences should matter as "not having marginal cost".
I said it does have marginal cost. After you brought up how a server request in this situation pretty much doesn't.
Because these rights are very different from the cost to handle an http request: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
> The only thing you've made clear with this line of reasoning is that you feel free to disregard anyone's preferences if they're inconvenient to you.
It's hard for me to believe you wrote this description of my argument in good faith. I have never even looked at these cameras, and if someone else's right to their own likeness got in the way of my own projects I would respect that right a lot. My own convenience has absolutely nothing to do with my argument. This is all about principles.
But, for a lot of things, we have to exist in the gap between ethics and law. If someone, with access to ostensibly public NYCDOT information, uses it for "dishonorable" (not illegal) purposes, the DOT has three choices: legislate its use, remove it completely, or ignore the issue. Whatever they do, with the exception of the ignore option, will result in the vilification of our clever soul. That person did not make any of the decisions that caused the removal of the previously accessible public information. They just had a thing, they used it, and something happened. Could that have been foreseen? Maybe, but marginal. Guaranteed? Probably not at all. I just don't think that blame is fair. Let the NYCDOT do what it'll do and the rest of us can replot our courses if necessary.
OSS libraries, released to the web or wherever, have the same set of choices; and the authors can do as they please. It's their stuff, and their right entirely. But, blaming someone who acted "dishonorably" and resulted in a novel set of legal restrictions on an OSS library doesn't seem right either.
If someone took an open source library that had a restrictive license, and used it in violation of that license, if it can be proven that they did so with the intention of ignoring the license, they can be held accountable. In this case, even if they were ignorant of the license, they can still be held accountable. We can definitely assign blame to these people, and more so in the case of the one doing it with malicious intent.
So why is the same not true of these cameras? Especially if now this person has been informed that their usage is against the wishes of the provider; even if it's questionable whether or not the initial usage is "dishonorable", once the provider's intentions have been made clear, if the "clever soul" persists, it's not out of malice, which is definitely dishonorable.
Intentionally violating someone's expressed preferences is often legal, but I think it's almost uniformly seen as a negative (i.e. dishonorable) thing. Except in the most extreme cases, where someone's preferences are generally considered unreasonable, we have good reason to treat those who ignore preferences as untrustworthy or unjust.
So there exists a fourth option: NYCDOT makes a plain request that this kind of usage stop, and then rely on people to honor those wishes. This is like basic social reciprocity, so I'm constantly amazed by how many people argue that we shouldn't engage in it. At the end of the day, that's what you're saying we should do: be fine with people who are asked to stop, and who respond with "no, you can't make me". It's not unreasonable that NYCDOT ask that their cameras not be used to gain people likes or viewers or money; but it does strike me as unreasonable to applaud people who intentionally ignore (and even flout!) the lack of enforceability of that ask.