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Re:People Staring at Computers by globular-toast on Monday July 12, 2021 @06:27AM (#27808870)
People in cities are captured on CCTV hundreds of times per day but nobody seems to mind. I remember some fifteen years ago sitting in pub with a group of people and being the only one who cared that there was a CCTV camera right above our table (it was one of those creepy omni-directional domes).

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.

Re:People Staring at Computers by vidarh on Monday July 12, 2021 @08:30AM (#27809566)
CCTV is impersonal, and rarely watched.

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.

Re:People Staring at Computers by vaylian on Monday July 12, 2021 @09:15AM (#27809891)
> People in cities are captured on CCTV hundreds of times per day but nobody seems to mind.

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.

Re:People Staring at Computers by dale_glass on Monday July 12, 2021 @08:20AM (#27809507)
The context is a very different one. CCTV is everywhere, but you know Apple is really only interested in security, and maybe keeping track of their own employees. They're not going to randomly make some sort of art project from their footage without lots of discussions with lawyers. I'm pretty sure they'd also make sure to get written consent from everyone involved.

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.