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insickness | 5 months ago

Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be. However, that doesn't mean your likeness can be used for just any purpose.

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theshrike79|5 months ago

The laws for this were written when "public photography" was someone with a film camera. It was maybe valid in the digital camera era.

But now I can point a camera at a crowd and It will:

  - count the number of people and animals there
  - give me an estimated gender for each
  - analyse the sentiment of each person
  - save their facial features so I can find "Male-sg76fg" in future photos automatically
  - store the GPS location
All this with consumer gear I can carry with me, no government level spy gadgets needed. All live at 2-20fps depending on how much hardware I throw at it.

With some extra work I can then find each of them on social media, grab their real names and other information from public sources and now I have a surveillance database. (Illegal where I live, but who's gonna check?)

This makes "public photography" a whole different thing from what it used to be.

flir|5 months ago

If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village.

(David Brin's been beating this drum for about three decades now - I doubt I could say anything he hasn't already said. https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html)

jolmg|5 months ago

> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.

IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.

acdha|5 months ago

Yes. There’s also something about the sheer volume of recorded media & ease of distribution which feels like we crossed a qualitatively different threshold. The laws around photography were set in an era when it cost money to take a photograph, the cameras were easier to notice and slower, and when someone took a photo it was highly unlikely that they’d share it widely. Now it’s basically impossible to avoid cameras, people take far more pictures than they used to, and anyone’s photos can reach large audiences and often easily linked back to you. There was nothing like the way random people could see someone having a bad day, post it, and half an hour later a million strangers have seen it - a newspaper or TV station could do that, but their staffers usually ignored things which didn’t have a legitimate news interest.

This feels kind of like the way you could avoid having extensive traffic laws & control systems in 1905 when only a few people had cars.

fmbb|5 months ago

Private persons snapping a few shots here and there in public capturing someone’s likeness is a drop in the bucket compared to all the automated surveillance photography and video out there. Let’s address that first so we are not straining out gnats but swallowing camels.

piva00|5 months ago

It shouldn't, you wouldn't be able to photograph candid moments in public of your own family/group of friends if anyone's else face showed up in the picture, that's not a world I want to live in.

It would also completely kill any form of street photography, even if you don't appreciate the art it would kill documenting times and places for posterity, for what benefit exactly?

sschueller|5 months ago

In Switzerland, you have the right to privacy including in public.

This means you can not make a photo/video of a person in public without their consent if they are the focus of your image. They also have the right to revoke consent anytime in the future.

The only exception is at large gatherings like for example the Street Parade where the expectation of privacy can not be expected especially since the event is televised.

This is also why you can not put cameras on your home that film public streets etc. They need to be blocked off or facing the other way.

anal_reactor|5 months ago

Eh. These laws exist in DACH area but the result is that when someone's committing a crime, you can't film them in order to create evidence, because that would breach their right to privacy. Someone stole shit from your front porch? Someone broke into your car? Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.

In more sensible countries the law says that it's legal to film, but it's not legal to publish videos and photos of people without their consent.

elric|5 months ago

This is an erroneous blanket statement. Photographing people in public is illegal in plenty of places, depending on what exactly you're doing. Taking a picture of a big crowd is usually fine. Singling out individuals sometimes isn't.

IIRC some countries recently started experimenting with automagically granting copyright to people for their own likeness, I think it was aimed at AI generates fakes, but it's probably more widely applicable.

Anyway, don't be a dick, don't take pictures of people without their consent.

Levitz|5 months ago

Well sure but all this is doing is displaying the audience on screens and drawing squares around their faces. I seriously doubt this breaks any law, I saw them in summer last year and they were already doing this, given that the article is about it happening rather than them getting sued, I think it's probably fine.