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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

It's not as irrational a fear as you're making it out to be.

Check out any number of tumblr blogs. People of Wal-Mart. Look at That Fucking Hipster, etc.

Or a very, very large section of /r/pics or /r/funny on Reddit.

Even ignoring the extreme cases like /r/creepshots, the Internet has already proven that it greatly enjoys taking pictures of strangers in everyday life and mocking them mercilessly.

People would like to go around with their fly accidentally undone and not have a bunch of armchair comedians commenting on their junk. People would like to go around on a bad hair day without it being picked apart by screeching Internet fashionistas. Our fear of being spread all around the internet is grounded in past instances of nobodies being spread all around the internet.

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I probably didn't clarify the core point well enough. Even if you're right - if the fear is rational - what is your alternative? Banning filming in public? Some of the more corrupt police forces would love nothing more than to have evidence of police brutality tossed out on those grounds.

To answer the tangent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representativeness_heuristic

Vigilance and self-policing, because you're right, regulation on this front has a highly chilling effect on expression.

This particular topic is near and dear to me - I do a lot of street photography which is, at least partially, defined as taking pictures of strangers in a documentary manner, and almost always takes place in public.

Countries with strong privacy laws, such as France and Japan, do suffer from this. The photographic community in the UK has been hit hard in the past few years as even innocuous picture-taking of popular landmarks has been hit with intense police scrutiny if your gear is too "good".

We do not want the heavy hand of government in here, because inevitably this will mean throwing the baby out with the bath water. Expression and art is usually at the boundaries of what society currently finds palatable, and activities along this border needs to be regulated by people, not immutable and slow-changing laws.

The only solution I can think of (and it's not a particularly good one) is to slam the door shut on people who would abuse their freedom of expression and whose actions will lead to the loss of freedom by inviting regulation. I'd rather oppose people rather than technology, though.

If only there would be something that detects the moment of snark forming in their head and snaps a picture of the commentator at that instant. Surely, there will be enough comedy material right there for everyone involved.

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