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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

This seems similar to how much of East Asia requires a “click” sound from camera apps, to prevent surreptitious photos, or how some US states require both parties to consent when recording audio of a conversation. There’s plenty of precedent for privacy laws related to public recording, across the world. And they don’t have to be perfect—the goal is to limit access to casual snooping and creepshots, and to ensure that those who habitually violate privacy can be prosecuted if caught.

Just because you’re in public doesn’t mean it’s ok to take secret upskirt photos, film in the gym showers, etc. There actually is a certain level of privacy expected in public.

Edit: corrected SE Asia to East Asia.

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Banning harmful behavior (like secretly recording someone) is pretty defensible and not all that controversial. Banning the mere possession of generic tools that could potentially be used to engage in harmful behavior is a lot more dubious. It requires infringing the rights of a bunch of innocent people merely because they might use that freedom to do something wrong.

The obvious solution is to have them behave like drones - where their behavior is geofenced.

Only issue with that is that enforcing it requires you to make open source smart glasses illegal, since open source software cannot be used to coerce users the way closed-source software can.

Perfect enforcement isn’t required, neither is a ban on DIY solutions. The intent is to prevent normalization. Laws against murder don’t prevent all murders either.

Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.

I don't want people to have to know how to solder to install an open source OS on their personal computing device. That sort of thing should be normal and easy.

So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.

I agree in part. Rather than a full ban, it makes more sense to require manufacturers to implement obnoxiously obvious “tells” (blinding LED plus sound perhaps), and to ban commercial businesses that remove these features. No need to ban possession. For DIY creepers a ban on the behavior is enough, they will get caught eventually.

The point is to ban widespread normalization of tools that make invasion of privacy easy. You can go find a shirt button spy cam on Aliexpress, but if you get caught wearing it then everyone knows what you’re up to. Wearing one in certain places could be taken as criminal intent.

(I don’t think restrictions like this would work in the US without an amendment, but I think we’re long overdue for a privacy amendment to clarify some things.)

Single party consent empowers those who are underhanded in uneven situations. For instance, the ability to secretly record my employer, who has far more resources than me, benefits me. I personally benefited in being able to defend myself by using single-party consent for audio recording, which helped me both avoid legal trouble and would have allowed me to offer more evidence had it ever come to actual legal action.

There are two sides to privacy laws, and the downside is not often discussed.

> This seems similar to how much of SE Asia requires a “click” sound from camera apps

I live in "SE Asia" - specifically Vietnam - and I've never heard of such a law. I just looked it up and the two countries that come up are Korea and Japan, neither of which are in SE Asia.

I guess you’re right, I always refer to them as SE Asia but it’s technically considered East Asia. Thanks for the correction.

> it’s technically considered East Asia

This phrasing seems odd, considering that those two countries are firmly in East Asia, and would not be considered as a part of SE Asia by any definition.

Well to me they’re part of an overall southeastern quadrant, with the northeastern quadrant occupied by Russia. It’s just how I think about things. If you divide it into eight directions plus a central region then it’s clearly East Asia, which is the common way to look at it.

It’s a habit of thought that I should break because it’s not really a common way to look at Asia, which makes communication difficult. It’s almost certainly a habit derived from discussion about the US, which is often discussed as four quadrants plus “the midwest,” which is really the center.

It might be how you think about things in your own mind but for many other people South East Asia as a region is a pretty commonly understood term with a fairly specific set of countries and basically considered to be the tropical part of Asia where it's always hot and humid. (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Myanmar, Brunei).

Yeah, lets also ban smart phones, cameras and recording devices just in case.

Somebody check this guy’s camera roll

Apple already did....hehehe...

Those kinds of comments usually come from either wrongdoers in denial or paid marketeers defending a policy/product...

This but unironically.

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