Although I don't want my child naked on the beach (she's half a year old) not because I mind someone seeing her naked but because of all the cameras/smartphones. The loss of privacy is real, and its a direct effect due to the common practice of taking your smartphone -with quality camera these days- with you everywhere.
[1] http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Cultural_victory_(Civ5)
In my line of work, I don't see an increase in privacy happening, I see exactly the opposite despite increasing privacy measures.
In fact, I see observation (video, audio, etc.) devices are literally going to be everywhere. They are in our devices, homes, cars, transportation vehicles (aircraft, public transit), cities, streets - there is nearly nowhere to hide - for any of us.
Whether this is right or wrong may not matter any more unless it can be controlled. Can it be controlled?
If it cannot be controlled, I see only one other option - and this is the sticky point...
..we have to be ready to face ourselves and each other publicly at all times. There will be little to no way to hide, to maintain privacy, etc. Our cultures will have to adapt, perhaps, at first, by trying to hide, enacting laws, etc. However, if it is inevitable that privacy cannot be maintained, then I argue, our culture will have to evolve.
Perhaps the culture of the future will protect your child from sexual predators in a different way. Perhaps we will have equal potential to be seen naked publicly whether on the Internet, a nude beach, regardless of age, gender or ethnicity.
To ensure the safety and security of society, people will have to change, even if our accepted norms of nudity, sexuality, etc. change. I can only hope that we as humans will be able to evolve to handle the changed paradigm and still ensure reasonable safety and security of society.
I will say, I believe people today globally already have to be extremely more open-minded than ever before, on average, just to mentally cope with how we have changed as humans.
Feel free to debate me here.. as I said, I am not sure if even I believe what I'm writing, but.. I'm trying to be open-minded about it.
For myself, I'm cool with a lot of that. My partner will have to decide for herself. Though it might affect me since we live together and have a child. We're adults though. Our child, however, is our responsibility and if I can protect her privacy in cases which are likely to backfire later on, I should, IMO. Don't get me wrong: I don't have the illusion I'll be able to protect her in every case in this regard but I believe this to be one of those examples. Another one is where your child did something stupid (such as breaking the law) and you documented it. Don't shame your child in public!
What's going to happen is that there will be documented cases of what children did in their youth which were not acceptable. But because roughly all children have that, its kinda OK. "We all were young" will have public sources to back it up, if they're searched for.
However not doing anything is a defeatist approach to the problem IMO. In that light, I find your post defeatist itself; instead of being open minded about this I suggest being pragmatic; a slightly different angle, also less extreme one way or the other. We still have some privacy left. You can, for example, wilfully leave your smartphone home as Bruce Schneier wrote in his latest book Data and Goliath. We have that choice. His essay Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? [1] also covers this very topic. Because that also covers how others should treat your private data, something the EU is far ahead on with privacy laws, right to be forgotten, GDPR, accountability on losing private data, etc compared to the USA.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...
However, the ultimate goal of this technology is to uniquely identify you for the sake of personalization, tracking, etc. There's an implicit grant being invoked that if anonymized properly or if certain measures are taken, then the privacy breach is ok.
I'm reminded of some culture I heard of once that refused to have photographs taken of themselves out of fear that it would steal their souls.
Any case where data is harvested via observations of you in which that data that represents you is not controlled by you or you are not aware of, seems like a breach of privacy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm not defeatist, I believe we have the power to change things. But, I'm also saying, I'm not sure, for a variety of reasons, we'll ever be able to rollback the concept of pervasive survellaince because, it is starting to become part of technological advancement - for our technology to recognize and work with us better, it must observe us. So long as that is the case, that ability can be abused unless it is protected, and, as security experts like Bruce Schneier have said, there is no such thing as absolute security, only security that lasts for a certain period of time [1].
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2008/01/the_psychol...
You are right though, we do have some control for ourselves and our families and we do have rights and responsibilities to protect that. And we can be pragmatic about that. To those things I cannot disagree and it is our responsibility as responsible adults to do that.
I think privacy will still exist, but maybe it will come at a premium outside of homes.
The primary processual means of protection we've come up with appears to be policy and regulation. Cultures differ so different policy and regulation in different places.
However, I'm seeing a trend of justifying privacy intrusion through the argument that "only the machine learning algorithm sees it". For any purpose, governmental or not, algorithmic or human, the breach of privacy is a breach.
I guess naturally we will likely find some kind of balance... or maybe not... but I do still believe we will be forced to confront the fact that we will see and know more of each other.
I'm not sure, that might be a good thing in one light, having to face each other, and the end of the concept of natural privacy on the other. Perhaps only those with the means to enforce their privacy will be able to in the future. I think that agrees with your point that outside of certain situations it might come at a premium. Or maybe it will come at a premium regardless of environment.
I'm reminded of the physics concept "the observer effect", by observing something you change it. That change is what we must face when we are almost always being observed.
Maybe this is just a local thing with my city's clothing-optional beach, but: there are seemingly strong social mores against using cameras (or even using a smartphone in a way that can be misconstrued as maybe taking a picture/video) on clothing-optional beaches.
As well, it's hard to carry around your camera or smartphone when you, yourself, are naked; and because of this, families on the beach where the family is naked, tend to move away from anyone who is wearing clothes. Weirdly enough, "clothed on a nude beach" = signal of being a pervert.
For myself, I could care less. I don't give a rat. For my partner, that's her choice. My child however, I have an issue with that.
I assume facial recognition will progress in the coming years, and I don't want my child's high school classmates to find a naked picture of her when she was still a toddler.
Whether I'm right or wrong on this, I cannot tell yet.
However if history repeats itself, she has a form of autism and will get bullied on school both like her father and mother. I don't want my kid to get bullied by this; my (in)action.
EDIT: Oh, and I once reported a picture hosted on Yahoo.com with a naked child on a beach. The response I got was that it was likely shot by the family as part of their children's pictures so it was "OK". That has the consequence of it being impossible to get such removed (though in the EU we do have the right to be forgotten).
I also don't parse why you would have wanted to get that picture removed... for the benefit of the child, whom you don't know? Why let them/its parents do it if it causes any issue? Imho, the more you sanitize, the worse the problem becomes.
Also, I am very much going to educate my child that in this world things you do are registered on social media and the Internet, and that pictures of her will be difficult to remove. That would, for example, result in that she'd refuse to get on camera during sex. That's for later though.
As for the picture. Because I genuinely thought I stumbled upon child pornography. It had to do with the pose, that nobody else was on the picture, and probably also some kind of discrimination on my side (the kid was Asian) plus the movie Holly [1] having made a deep impact on me.
Now pictures of adults as teenagers, that's a different kind of laugh ...
Overall we arent all that purdish.
> Overall we arent all that purdish.
Not everyone in the USA is, but do you remember the drama about Janet Jackson's nipple? Or how protective ratings in games and movies/series are regarding anything related to sex, yet violence seems totally OK? That's the double standard of the USA. It doesn't have to be this way.
Before the innovation of smartphones with high quality cameras young children, here, used to be just naked on beach. It also used to be very normal to breastfeed in public.
But there are various possible factors as the article describes. Since as you need to lock your smartphone up (not allowed to take with you) this doesn't explain why saunas are now more prudent.
I thought north America and their shorts weird at first, but I switched quickly. My friends were later scandalized when I told them I used to wear speedos.
Today, when I go back, nearly everyone is wearing north American style shorts and very occasionally the tight long boxer like speedos.
Anyway it could just be cyclical fashion.
1. You are in a competitive swimming event
2. You are from another country
3. You are a college student trying to be funny
There was a TV ad in Australia (originally from the UK) related to this. It asks the simple question: "How far away from the beach do bathers become undies?"
In the old times only people around you saw you. Today someone is there with a phone, takes a photo and the photo can be uploaded to the net for everyone to see.
And the data on sexting shows that it's very much a minority of Americans who send/receive nudes: http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/10/23/teens-adults-and-sexti...
Digital cameras. Young girls don't mind being topless in front of the people on the beach. They do mind being photographed and finding themselves in some online collection being shared across the planet. Coupled with the risk of facial recognition or other tagging schemes, they really don't want their identities/addresses being shared alongside semi-nude pictures. Cameras now have a much greater "creep potential" than film.
I would also suggest that a greater awareness of skin cancer means younger people generally cover up more, trickling down to lesser toplessness for both men and women.
Because those who do record it are doing their best to make sure not get spotted
Or as alluded to, maybe it's just the sexualization of nakedness.
Even in otherwise conservative countries (like Italy), sexualization, in media and in society at large, just wasn't a big deal in continental Europe...
You could watch things in national broadcasting that would be off limits for Americans for example. And similarly for movies and books.
And she was not even that provocatively dressed (way less than the average working class girl -- what english would call a "chav" -- in her late teens going out for a drink on friday/saturday)
You could not believe me (as a random person on the web), but your phrasing implies that you also consider this somehow beyond the realm of possibility. It happened in Athens, if that matters.
>do you seriously feel that this actually works in changing the attitude of a society
Yeah, where's the surprise? Changes in demographics, like an increased presence of people with more conservative values in an area, can, and do, change the attitudes of a society, just like immigration can influence cuisine, music, religion, and other cultural aspects.
I contest believing that young people going to beach in France or Italy would give even passing thought to what these people think or want, because it's completly outside the realm of my experience of the people that I've ever known to go to the beach, ever. A vastly more likely consideration is avoiding unwanted attention from people that approve of mostly undressed girls.
I don't think that you understand (I don't know, maybe you live here?) how socially -isolated- immigrants are.
On the beach, no, but it can be a factor on how people dress to go outside on the city, or to avoid certain streets, and so on.