Re:People Staring at Computers
by PragmaticPulp on Monday July 12, 2021 @10:08AM
(#27810428)
> The most curious thing about this project is how people seem to have a visceral reaction to having photos of them made without their permission;
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.
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.