meanwhile

[baxil]

One of the most observant things I ever said was something I first pointed out four years ago: "There is no international crisis so major that it can't be interrupted by a small, stupid crisis close to home."

I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of my friends list is devoting mindspace to Strikethrough 2007 right now (short summary: yes, LJ

Comments

[baxil]

"This image infringes on my privacy" is a nice gesture, but what it boils down to is functionally the same thing as a "Please opt me out of your spam" link.

What a privacy ticky-box does is make us all responsible for discovering any potential appearances we might have anywhere on the service. Maybe you could make a plausible argument that common sense says we should check our homes to make certain we're not standing naked in the window; but under what sane interpretation of personal responsibility would the burden be on the guy in my post to discover the random strip-club photo before the Internet did

[kadyg]

He's standing on the sidewalk facing away from the strip club and could easily be waiting for traffic to clear to get across the street to the thai place, or the bodega or the movie theatre or Quiznos. Or he could have been coming from The Great American Music Hall half a block away. (This was taken a block from my dorm.) In this particular instance, if you're going to stand on a public street in downtown SF, there will be a strip club or adult business somewhere in the background.

I would have a hard time claiming invasion of privacy in this photo. He's not shown anywhere near a residence and this also falls solidly within the journalism invasion of privacy standards. While I see your point, I don't think this photo is the best example.

[baxil]

True that he could be there for any number of reasons, but that's not the assumption people are going to make. If he's NOT there for porn ... well, I don't see how that makes it any better. I don't know if it's recognized in the U.S., but some jurisdictions consider information that's substantially true but misleads people into believing something false about the target to be defamatory.

And as far as invasion of privacy - what you're thinking of (seeing as how we both have media backgrounds) probably isn't actually privacy law, but rather the distinction between public and private figures and legitimate news interest. Such as:

A newspaper in Alabama published a photograph of a woman whose dress was lifted by jets of air at a Fun House at a county fair. The court ruled that the photograph, which showed her panties, had no "legitimate news interest to the public" and upheld an award of $ 4166 to plaintiff, for invasion of her privacy. Daily Times Democrat v. Graham, 162 So.2d 474 (Ala. 1964).Used to be, when there was a limited

[charles]

An interesting article. (I got in trouble with my family a few years ago for putting Christmas photos up on Flickr. I literally didn't even think what I was doing at the time-that's just where I put photos.

[heron61]

Charles Stross has a fair amount of interesting stuff to say about privacy and technology. It's a lost battle at this point, and as long as we end up with something more like Brin's Transparent Society than a rigid police state, I'm fairly happy with the idea. Laws will need to adapt, and hopefully will result in eliminating many trivial and ubiquitous crimes. If the laws keep up (I expect they will in the EU and won't, at least for a while in the US), I actually think that the decline of privacy may end up being a good thing. The idea that anything done in public is explicitly public actually seems like a good idea to me. I also expect that in-home privacy will continue, but will require some effort (special window shades, etc...) to insure.

[baxil]

> The idea that anything done in public is explicitly public actually seems like a good idea to me.

I respectfully disagree. This assumes good faith on the part of the watchmen.

If everything that you buy, every building that you enter, every conversation you have with friends while out over coffee, is permanently a part of the public record ... any group with a vested interest in social control has that much more ammunition against you.

To name two quick examples:

Fundamentalist religions would gain complete surveillance over their members' public lives. Any group seeking to enforce behavior restrictions on its members could have essentially cultlike control. I don't see any reasonable method of solving this social problem before the technological one overtakes us.

I don't know much about Brin's Transparent Society, but I have a hard time seeing how equiveillance would prevent state surveillance abuses. You can't decide what data the authorities gather about you, and if they set you up for a campaign of harassment, the fact

[thrames]

I'm not terribly worried.

For one, as the technology matures, people will get used to it, and for two, it's not going to be nearly as widespread as everyone will have to be worried all the time. Rural places and industrial hellholes will still be pretty ignored as far as teh Google vans go.

Further, as tech improves, so does counter-tech.

[baxil]

"Personal indiscretions aside, the larger concern is for people entering and leaving places like domestic violence shelters, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, fertility clinics and controversial religious or political events, Bankston said."
(source)

It's not the technology, it's the loss of control.

[nolly]

I don't think Google's the first to do this, though they may be the first for some residential areas. One of the first task sets on mturk.com, over a year ago, was picking the best photo of a given address from the set they had for its vicinity, for the A9 search.