People don't understand how technology works. More than that - because it's not really about computers. Most people don't understand how reality works. What is information. How reasoning works. What can you infer from observations.
They feel (and sometimes, in some places, really think) that a picture is like a piece of their soul. But it isn't. It's just a hash of their phenotype, useful mostly to check if it matches to a person (or another picture of them). It's mostly irrelevant.
The soul - that leaks out in all the rest of your digital footprint. The sites you visit, the articles you read, the things you look at when scrolling. The ads you click, the ads you ignore, the products you buy, the products you only check out but don't add to your cart. The messages you send. The posts you comment on. Where you comment on them from, and on what device. How long did you own it, how many other devices do you own, how do your habits differ between those devices. Who you "befriend" or follow on-line, who follows you. Etc.
All these things add up to who you are. Taken together, they give a comprehensive look at both your personality and your life circumstances. Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.
I'd say people understand very well the implications of a photo. If all there was to a photo is showing "the shell that you won in the genetic lottery" there would hardly be a point in photography.
I disagree with your assessment. It's part acceptance, part different priorities, and part ignorance.
Some people understand what is being gathered and simply accept that as a worthwhile exchange for free stuff. Maybe even a beneficial one (ads are more relevant).
Some people just care about different things than you do. Maybe they're very self-conscious about their image and not particularly concerned about their shopping habits being known.
And some just aren't aware of the potential for abuse that exists with modern data collection. They think we're still at the early stage, where a company is just trying to figure out which brand of beer to stock, and unaware of modern elaborate profile building and the amount of creepy targeting and manipulation they make possible.
I think that’s partly our experience, and partly our generic heritage — an ‘attractive’ face is one where the effect of the emotional affect correlated with reproductive success.
And I think pop-culture locked room mystery crime shows like Sherlock and Jonathan Creek would be written very differently if the puzzle solving character was supposed to represent the norm rather than the exception.
All sounds very profound. But a photo shows so much more : it shows how fit you are, if you look healthy and happy. It also shows how you treat yourself and how you feel about yourself.
I am very aware of this as I changed quite a bit over the last years and these effects can't be understated.
My point is, all those little bits of data that are being collected all the time, by almost every website and program you use, leak all of this and much more. It doesn't "feel" like you're revealing anything important, and yet a full visibility into a week of your browsing history will tell me an order of magnitude more about you than a random photo ever could. A year's worth of your digital footprint will tell me more than your whole photo album. Etc.
(And the worst thing is, when you make and share your photos digitally, companies get both.)
- Most people have little clue about how reality works;
- Companies thriving on people's data do their best to perpetuate that state of things;
- I don't blame people from being ignorant about practical implications of complex topics at the intersection of mathematics and philosophy; I blame companies for exploiting that lack of understanding.
I blame governments for not protecting the weak.
Businesses always exploit their up front investments in knowledge (and equipment) to get money from customers. The problem is when they're allowed to conceal and actively mislead the public about that knowledge in order to maintain their monopoly on that knowledge. Even worse, since there's absolutely no competitive advantage in defecting, it becomes a natural cartel.
A functional government would carefully classify and explain all the elements of the problem, then determine how to regulate it through democratic processes.
The problem starts with the fact there's never been a clear right to privacy in the US. Instead it's just a phrase and a weird set of principles stitched together from ancient court decisions about celebrities. The US benefits from its freedom of speech baseline being enshrined in the constitution rather than being a patchwork (like in the UK for example.) The right to privacy should be that clear as well.
A faceless computer, doing it in the background environment outside of your perception unless you really dig in under the hood triggers none of that. It's the same reason why most humans are not anxious about the footprints they leave in the sand on the beach, because it feels about the same.
A lot of the rich and powerful understand this dynamic well, and use environmental stonewalling to say no to people vs. a direct human interaction.
Today on BBC Radio there was a discussion about racism on the big technology platforms (after the England/Italy match last night), and how their human moderators were overwhelmed. Someone whose name I missed said "I don't think it should be too hard for a computer to look at the monkey emoji and decide if it's being used in an inappropriate context". It was like hearing the "research team and five years" XKCD in real life.
> "Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery."
Tell that to the teacher who lost her job for posting a vacation photo including her holding alcohol, in 2009: https://www.good.is/articles/facebook-and-privacy-fired-for-...
I'll tell you that a photo of my son flailing out of a blanket is a deeply personal memory of a hilarious and touching moment.
That he has an electronic device is so incredibly irrelevant it's hard to put into words.
> Photos? Photos just show the shell that you won in the genetic lottery.
No, they show a moment.
If you were right, people would care about all photos being shared or none. But that's not what happens - people care about some far more than others.
A normal picture of a person could still expose something important about them to the wrong party. Eg, "I visit the unsavory part of town", "I'm not really washing my hair", "I'm slacking off", etc. Those are mostly "real-world" concerns.
There's the paranoia angle: some stranger wants your picture specifically. What could they have in mind?
If you look at least somewhat remarkable, you might end up being part of some meme, or being photoshopped into something. You might be the next Magikarp Guy, if somebody snaps a picture at exactly the wrong moment.
With Google the concerns are quite different. While Google pries a lot, so far it's mostly invisible. Google fortunately isn't run by edgy teens looking for the maximum lulz, but by boring accountants looking for profit. So though there's still plenty things to be concerned about, the concern isn't as visceral.
Google is the most targeted company by hackers for sure. Google sit on exabytes of personal data, and it's like hoarding tonnes of dangerous radioactive waste, which if it got in the wrong hands, could be very dangerous. That's why their security is unparalleled. They have a lot of dirt on people.
Big companies' data collection is on the whole quite subtle, and they like it that way. Google will suck up tons of data, digest it, and use it to throw ads at you. But it doesn't really occur to anybody that Google might be interested in looking for people picking their nose in front of their phone's camera, and making a compilation of that to present as "art". If anything of the sort happened, Google would make sure to make an example of whatever rogue employee did that. They like their data collection to be obscure and harmless looking. That's not to say that it is harmless, but finding problems with what Google is doing takes at least a bit of intellectual thought.
Meanwhile, an artist secretly recording people is almost certain to have some sort of quirky agenda that's going to immediately turn a large amount of people off, even if it's ultimately silly and non-consequential.
Can you explain this one?
In general, I mean that having your picture taken at the wrong time can reveal things people would rather not be revealed, even if to the photographer it looks completely ordinary and harmless.
Some people here will reference the 24/7 CCTV surveillance, but that's kept private and not published as some sort of art project. So though one could compile a video of my coming and going around the town by looking at surveillance tapes, in practice that doesn't really happen. Now random photographers and artists however are very likely to put their work somewhere public.
There is a glimer of hope data about us online might be found, and deleted, one day.
I can't stand my picture being taken, especially by strangers. I have given up to DMV, but not Costco.
My know it all father retired, and was bored. He decided to buy a camera, and take pictures of the homeless on Market Street. He was big in reveling in other people's missery. (I loved the man, but didn't respect anything about the man.)
He didn't understand why the guys were flipping him off, or running away.
I told him to stop his "art" project, or take pics of birds.
He kept it up, until this huge guy dragged him into a alley, and threw his Canon against the wall.
My dad found a new hobby.
I also don't understand why he did not listen to the advice, but i guess some people can only learn from making a mistake.
That's being said, street photography is hard. Especially when you add empathy. All the shots I'm taking are extremely calculated. Trying not to focus on one person squarely, not upsetting someone during the process is extremely energy consuming.
If anyone tells me they don't want their face to be shot, I show them the photo. If they hesitate even for a microsecond, that image is gone for good. I'm not a voyeur and have no intention to violate anyone's boundaries even from 100 feet away.
Knowing nobody is unhappy because of my hobby lets me sleep better at night.
"Surveillance Camera Man": https://youtu.be/mP5ZVPwP7bg
Edit: It seems the link above has now been made private but that was not the case for many years. I will keep the comment as above for the sake of historical accuracy. More details here:
(There were, of course, other factors that a reasonable person could be concerned about with Glass - "glassholes", for one, and providing more data to Google for another)
The complaints primarily came from Apple. This artist effectively hijacked their private camera system and then published the resulting images with a personal emphasis on certain individuals.
People would have a similar negative reaction if he had hacked into their store security cameras, focused on video of a few people, and then published those stolen images as art. We all know we’re recorded by security cameras when we go into private stores, but we also know that the images won’t cropped down to our faces and posted publicly online as art.
Likewise, it would be a different situation if the artist had broken into a company’s private ad targeting database, singled out a few individuals, and posted their tracking information publicly in a way that personally identified them. It really is different when a company uses aggregate data to target ads than if that same data would be published publicly for anyone to see and judge. The latter is a massive privacy violation in front of other individuals. The former is only ever seen by computer algorithms serving us ads without human intervention.
Private camera system? You mean the webcams that are open to the public in Apple stores?
[assumed]
You don't see the same visceral reaction to CCTV, which is much more akin to the mass surveillance performed by Google et Al, but if someone walked up to you in a coffee shop and stuck a USB key into your laptop and said "it's just an anonymous keylogger, don't worry about it" you would likely get the visceral reaction you're talking about.
The other reason is more visceral, in the fact that those photos of themselves and others were displayed semi-publicly. A lot of the tracking that goes on is invisible if you don't think too hard about it (out of sight, out of mind). If they saw a dump of a bunch of people's private messages or search history (even anonymized) posted online for anyone to see, they would likely be similarly spooked.
I think that's cognitively different concept. And I guess this distinction is also the hidden rationale of rejecting nationalized corporations to have similar power as Google, I.e., when they are nationalized, they suddenly conceptually exposed their information "public". Although in reality, a nationalized Google probably would never reach the same level of perversity as Google...
Surveillance Camera Man showed that people have often violent reactions to being overtly filmed by individuals in public. These videos appear to be gone from Youtube now, but if you hadn't seen it he would often just film people do mundane stuff in public like drinking coffee. People always questioned what he was doing, he would tell them "I'm just making a video" and they wouldn't be pleased.
If you told someone you were going to install a keylogger on their machine they would almost certainly be against you doing that. But people voluntarily use "cloud" services like Google Docs etc. which are literally keylogging devices.
I think there is a strong tendency for people to submit to what they consider to be authority. Some random guy on the street isn't authority. But the government is. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. are. Unfortunately it leads people to spend energy on things that don't matter, like the random guy on the street, and not the things that do matter, like systematic global surveillance.
Impersonal collection and personal collection evokes very different concerns in people. Impersonal bulk collection is easier to dismiss as "they're not looking for me", whereas the latter raises all kinds of questions about motivation.
That argument is a bit vague. How does minding work in this case? People who are opposed to CCTV will try to avoid it. But will that avoidance be visible to the rest of the public? Hardly so. Besides, many cameras tend to be placed at places where cameras blend in and you need to make an effort to actually spot them.
We can also expect a company like Apple would be very risk averse in this regard, and keep far away from anything too weird.
Some random guy doing their own project going by just whatever seems reasonable to them and installing surveillance software on somebody else's computers isn't really the same sort of thing.
AFAIK 'Messages in iCloud' is enabled when iCloud backup is enabled and can be switched off easily if one only wants to have messages locally on the device.
I don't know. For me, the photo makes it a discrete moment that I can identify, more tangible, compared to my ISP silently recording every website I visit.
I think there are probably many reasons why. I actually think Apple's new commercial for privacy gets at this well, where it has people literally following someone around and snooping on them, asking questions, and I think that visceral surveillance may few much more intrusive than the hidden forms.
Unencrypted, for them to see?
A while back, Apple was aiming to transition to store iMessage backups using a more secure method; ie. the same method that some other content such as Health data is stored, which uses encryption keys derived using local info such as your macOS or iOS password. The FBI requested Apple not to make this change, and Apple complied.
Apple runs a great PR game when they talk about privacy, but the reality is nowhere near the same. Some things are fully encrypted so that Apple cannot decrypt, while other things are not safe to store with them. iMessage falls into the latter bucket.
I disable iCloud Backup because there isn't much that is useful in there that isn't under one of the other checkboxes (Photos is separate, Health is separate, Messages is separate), so my messages should be safe?
I am not saying that to necessarily advocate for the former, but rather to point out that the latter is the focus of Apple's "PR game"
However, in case of someone taking photo of a face without permission, a) and b) above no longer hold true - it is their face - totally tangible, something a lot more personal and something people hold much more dear than the last search query and they never "agreed" to it (neither explicitly nor in their head).
One evening, I binged on some of these out of the usual board, morbid interest and came to the conclusion it's all about having a target.
Being bagged and tagged by a faceless blob, corporate machine, neural network, whatever, is one thing. Kind of goes in to some archive, we know it's there, but we also can't really assign anything other than nebulous intent to the whole affair.
In short, there is not much to respond to. And by that, I mean in the human way, face to face, or mind to mind.
On the other hand, there is some guy holding a camera! Or she is RIGHT THERE with her camera! Now, there is a person, the whole activity gets personified, and intent seems to flow like magic, as do the questions!
People have major boundary issues too. Many confuse standing in a public space while filming private property with actually somehow violating that property. Others do not want to be filmed, and some get it and just move away. Others have control issues and end up the star of the show, despite very clearly not wanting that outcome.
So that is one theory. When a big entity does it, somehow we've got a level of trust or acceptance buffering responses. At the least, we don't have a clear target to engage about it, or assign intent to it.
When a specific person does this thing, we do have that target, and it all being more human brings out more humanity.
Edit: There is also potential guilt, or fear associated with having a specific target.
When a specific person is making a record of our activities on the job, or in a public space, there exists a potential for judgement of some kind. Both by the photographer, and or their audience, somehow. We recognize that person could amplify that which would otherwise go ignored in the noise.
Now, that person could do exactly nothing too, and our actions in response have a lot to do with whatever outcome ends up out there for public viewing. "You are gonna be famous on YT" packs a punch. People worry!
They know they could be the next "Dog Shit Girl" or they worry about something they do, have done, want to do, and whether amplification of that changes risk / reward for it, whatever it is, be it merely inadvisable due to some social norm or other being in play or flat out illegal somehow.
Perhaps none, but you never can tell for sure. Not everybody subscribe to this "radical openness" notion, so it's safe to assume people are not feeling comfortable being photographed. By the same logic, what harm is a random picture of you on the nude beach? Probably none, if you are not an alien you are very unlikely to have anything special that nobody seen before. Doesn't mean you have a license to show up there with a camera
Everyone can do the same activity as I do, go the same places. Buy the same things. But nobody can have the same face as me. In this way, things do not seem comparable. Privacy is at risk on another level.
Also, I feel it is in tendency easier to understand the risks and potential abuse of your picture being online as compared to the risks and abuse when google knows what you type into their search field.
https://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-am-an-object-of-internet-ri...
Edit: it does not have to be ugly, just something to draw immediate emotional reaction.
That's way worse IMO, but doesn't seem to illicit the same response as this guy's art.
It's weird. What harm is a random picture of my face in public going to do? But still some people worry so much about that.
Whereas only very few people show the same reaction to the fact that Google stores a copy of every word you typed into their search field ever. Or that Apple stores a copy of every message I have sent to a loved one with my phone on their servers.
We accept that our most private thoughts are being captured, analyzed, sold; but the outrage is about someone taking an anonymous photo of us in a public setting.