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Comment by stuartjohnson12 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention "auditors", whose goal is to use the ambiguous nature of feels-like-a-privacy-invasion-but-legally-isnt when you stick a camera in someone's face in a public place to try and get a rise out of people and prance around as victim.

I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes

You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.

We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?

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The idea of public and private needs a similar distinction like libel and defamation.

Ephemeral public has no expectation of ephemeral privacy, but me walking down a street with a handful of people on it should not lead me to expect that being recorded and having it broadcast to the entire human race, permanently, for eternity.

>...but me walking down a street with a handful of people on it should not lead me to expect...

You shouldn't have an expectation either way. If anything, the expectation that you will not be recorded is more of a violation of the social contract that the reverse. It's a public space that can be used for many purposes. If the effect on bystanders is minimal then attempting to exclude an activity is wrong. Can we say "I don't want you to see me, so look away whenever I am out." "I don't want to wait in traffic so everyone else has to pull over and clear the road when I am driving." "I didn't consent to this smell, so this restaurant has to turn off their stoves and ovens hours before I will be coming by."

Reality is that you can't exclude others if they aren't doing something that excludes you.

The way they do it in Germany is it's legal to have a recording that incidentally includes a person but it's not legal to have a recording of the person.

To be clear, I am talking about a hypothetical ought-to-be and not specifically discussing the current law anywhere.

I hear you and I agree public spaces involve us working and coexisting together, not tailoring the public space to what one person wants.

On the other hand, there is something in me that doesn't like for-profit rage bait creators monetizing how I react to a guy shoving a camera in my face and doing something irregular. I feel like it is a type of assault we don't have a name for yet but that should conceivably be criminal.

I just realize that I'm acting like the those that first saw the printed word or a camera and felt uneasy about it, I am just an old man angry that video cameras and globalization of content exists. I'm probably just a luddite trying to stop the world from progressing.

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