I wonder if it's a generational or cultural difference present in the comments here.
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
I find photos and videos to both be invasive and unwanted.
I’ve been a member and gyms where the owner will start taking videos and pictures of the class that ultimately end up on social media or in marketing material. I’m not ok with it and I get incredible uncomfortable when I’m in some weird position to do an exercise and a camera starts heading my way.
Any time an unwanted camera is around there is some level of anxiety that starts creeping up. Maybe this is, in part, why so many of today’s youth have anxiety disorders. How can anyone just relax if they have to worry about anything they might say or do being on camera, and then posted for the world to see.
I was at a party not too long ago where most people were 45+, and some kids that were too young to have phones. No one was on their phones, and people seemed free to dance and whatever. The second one person took out their phone to take a picture/video the vibe shifted drastically, and the owner of the house told them to put it away, so people could go back to enjoying themselves instead of being worried about an embarrassing picture of video that might surface later.
I’ve seen so many good times destroyed by cameras.
I am assuming you have no good alternatives regarding your gym? Because if you feel uncomfortable with the behaviour of the owners, you should really vote with your wallet.
Classes are a different story, but at least for the legion of would-be gymfluencers that show up in gyms frequented by us zoomers, there's an easy solution: tell them to please not film you. If they don't comply, mess up their video. Deliberately walk across the camera. Deliberately get in the way. Take the machine against which they're resting a cell phone and start using it. Make funny faces. Whatever.
More people should understand you are no more morally obligated to behave sociably toward those exhibiting antisocial behavior than you are to stay your hand from a man who hits you.
Then there are those who film in the locker rooms which arguably should be reason to ban them from said gyms.
Imo these types should stick to "influencer gyms". They exist. Alphaland in Texas is a great example; a friend of mine frequented it as she started her bodybuilding page. Worked great for her. Just stay the hell out of the "normal people" gyms.
My kids are in elementary and middle school and there was an occasion where they were at a birthday party where an older sibling was live streaming the event.
Both my kids (and me) found it very off-putting, so there's some anecdata that at least some young kids still feel it's an invasion of privacy.
There are lots of young people who have some conception and respect of privacy and there are people who haven't. That's not a generational thing.. It's just that those without awareness of boundaries have now all the tech that screams in their face to stream everything to the world without consent. I can assure you that still lots of young folks are annoyed by those people.
My own anecdotal experience is that the generational gap is actually the inverse of what was described above. Younger people seem to be very much moree acutely aware of the dangers of publicity and much more guarded about what they do in public if it could potentially end up online.
I’m currently wedding planning and regularly visit a wedding planning forum. I was left flabbergasted the other day when someone posted if it would be ok to ask guests to not post pictures of the couple on social media. They’re ok with guests posting pictures of themselves or of the venue and decor, they just don’t really want pictures of the bride and groom.
The response ranged from “you can ask but you can’t prevent people from posting” to “it’d be rude and inconsiderate to even ask”. One person even argued that it would be rude and other people would judge them if they went to a wedding and didn’t have a picture of the bride and groom.
I don’t think I ever felt the generational divide as acutely as in reading those responses, and I’m not even that old, I had social media when I was in high school.
This gets asked at basically every wedding I've been to in the UK i.e. there is a professional photographer, please don't take photos of the bride and groom in the church and it still gets ignored. At my own wedding, one of the guests (not even someone invited to the whole day, just a neighbour of my wife's parents who knew her growing up) is leaning out of the aisle with their phone taking photos ruining a load of photos.
It's incredibly frustrating. I also think it's really strange that when something happens in public, the default isn't to look to see if the person isn't OK anymore, it's to pull out a camera phone and start filming.
It could be more that those hanging around on wedding planning forums aren't really representative of the younger generation. If it's a wish of the couple, they should clearly communicate this on the invitation.
I went to a middle eastern wedding recently and they gave everyone these phone pouches to keep their phones in that were locked for the event's duration.
Anyone finding it rude would find themselves not only on the "formerly invited and definitely not welcome" list. But also on the "good riddance, it was nice having known you once" list.
People with such little respect for boundaries are just not welcome in my life.
I attended my first GenZ wedding a couple of months ago and they (someone on behalf of the couple) announced this request. It applied specifically to the wedding itself, not the post-wedding party (at the same venue).
Certainly the first time it had ever come up, but it made sense to me. If you're invited to someone's wedding, it's only natural to respect their wishes.
I'm from Gen Z and the idea of being filmed and published online without my consent sounds like a nightmare.
It is my belief that it's an invasion of privacy (even in a public space) and questionable from a (cyber)security perspective.
In France we got the Droit à l'image (Right to the image) which makes it illegal to post images or videos of people online without their consent, so that may be why that feels very strange to me.
And yet it happens thousands (or more) times a day. Even in the US there is the idea of publicity rights--I can't use an easily identifiable photo of you in an ad or other marketing materials. But posting on Flickr or wherever where someone hasn't shoved a camera in your face but you're easily identifiable?
France - where the 'Society of the Spectacle' was written by Guy Debord in the 1960s, where he predicted late stage capitalism as being mediated by images, so rather than reality, human existence and relationships between people are 'mediated by images'.
This is at the heart of what is going on. Society of the Spectacle is not an easy read, but it most definitely is pertinent to what is going on. Instagram is the final boss!
> I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I’d argue photos can be more invasive. If someone makes a 10 minute video and you’re somewhere in the background for 5 seconds, no one may ever notice. Furthermore, with compression artefacts for motion you may become difficult to recognise.
But if you’re in a photo, people will be looking at it for longer and are thus most likely to notice you and possibly zoom in on you with all the quality the static sensor provides.
Furthermore, photographs have greater potential to create false narratives. A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.
> A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.
Taking a screenshot from a video for exactly this reason is incredibly common. Look at any photograph accompanying a political story about a figure from "the other party".
See for example this Reddit post about the "triggered" meme origin:
> Ironically, if you ever get a chance to see the video of this incident, this woman and the man she's speaking with are actually having a polite discussion. But... She has very animated facial expressions and the photographer just happened to catch this frame at an inopportune moment.
So it seems to me that since a video is simply thousands of photographs with a soundtrack, video is strictly more invasive than photography.
you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship
Your perception of this as a risk probably suggests cultural and/or generational differences.
But for the actual circumstances of the fine article’s author, video is a norm of the community the author seeks to join. Within the community, video is an established practice and making a video rig signifies a higher degree of commitment to the community.
Not accepting the use of video, is at least a partial rejection of the community values. Accepting video is a tradeoff for participating in community practices. The practical alternative is usually to find or build an alternative community. [0]
To put it another way, joining the bird watching community means keeping lists. Yes, of course you can just watch birds for your personal pleasure, but documentation is a core community activity.
[0] sure logically it is possible to change a community, but marginal members (e.g. new, casual, low status) are rarely in position to overturn established practice and run the risk of being set up for the agendas of established members.
> To put it another way, joining the bird watching community means keeping lists. Yes, of course you can just watch birds for your personal pleasure, but documentation is a core community activity.
How do you define community? Seems like a bit rigid of a implied requirement.
The whole idea of conflating community and publicity or some documentation requirement seems a bit silly to me, and it's definitely not rare, but an individual is perfectly within their right to go about engagement in their hobby with other people who have similar interests on whichever terms they like, which seems like community to me, as long as some form of commonly understood communication is present.
Likewise the people who do want to establish certain requirements, gates if you will, have the right to do so, but not as a whole. Country clubs don't and shouldn't have exclusive domain over golf, and I don't give the slightest fuck about recording myself at the bouldering gym or skateboarding, but that shouldn't prevent me from being part of either culture or community unless a specific club within those forms around publication.
I'd concede that it's possible that a community could exist in such a way that the act of documenting is the exclusive basis for which people are able to communicate at all, in which case perhaps that defines the boundary, but again it seems like it would be rare for that to be so pervasive as to encapsulate the entirety of a hobby.
I’m Gen Z and I get how someone could be annoyed by this, but it’s also just part of life. I get annoyed when people smoke in public or pointlessly honk horns at night. But you have to accept that being around other people means some people do things you aren’t a fan of.
Smoking in restaurants and bars used to be a part of life, until it wasn’t. It took about 5 years for that shift to roll out pretty much everywhere. And it’s so much nicer without it.
There’s nothing stopping us from saying this sucks, it’s socially toxic, and we’re not going to put up with it anymore.
That's a completely ridiculous comparison. Pointlessly honking or smoking does not create a public record of your activities shared globally without your consent.
Yeah? Who said that? Any selfish person can say the same about anything. "Yeah my dog shat your lawn but that's just part of life. Deal with it". What's part of life is different for everyone.
>I get annoyed when people smoke in public or pointlessly honk horns at night.
Yeah that's annoying, but neither the smoke or the honk are records of your private life published without consent on the internet, forever. So apples and oranges.
your way of thinking shows clearly your lack of comprehension on the subject... you didn't experience the world before the internet, so you think that the internet is "part of life". Let me tell you as someone that helped build it, that it isn't part of life. It's something that we made up, like our ancestors build the railways. Those were neither part of life. Unike the addiction to social media that was carefully engineered by top class psychologists, without anyone realizing. That shouldn't be part of life, but here we are :(
It is very much cultural. In the 2000's I moved from Japan where they're very strict about public filming/taking pictures (it's something you don't do, period) to the US where people were uploading photos to Flickr and tagging people there. Completely different worlds, and we're not even talking about Gen Z because none of them were old enough to be even teenagers.
That seems weird to me. I remember in the pre-smartphone days when Japanese were the nationality whose tourists were snapping pictures everywhere and group photos in business settings was the norm when Americans at least were sort of thinking weird but whatever.
There were plenty of TV shows centred around candid camera / security camera / home video footage back in the 1980s/1990s well before digital cameras or the internet was ubiquitous.
Or look at newsreels, or news reports from ... any time up to the 2010s. Obviously people's faces weren't blurred before we had the tech to do it. It's some entirely new, modern prissiness. It screws up the documenting of social history when you can't see any faces. There's been an internet fad for restored film of street scenes from 1915 or so: imagine if all the faces were blurred to protect the privacy of people who no longer care, that would suck.
I mean, I feel like the mindset of privacy and no one can have photos of me is a fairly recent phenomenon. Parents or grandparents definitely had books photos of everyone important to them and probably would have found it weird for someone to ask not to be photographed.
It is primarily a cultural one. You won't find many countries with the "well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces" opinion outside the anglo-saxon world.
The UK is a special place because culturally it belongs to the anglo-saxon sphere but legally it inherited the strict EU personality rights.
That's the solution. You don't want to be recorded? Attend "no-recording" event. If there are no such events, tough luck. Market is not obligated to serve your particular needs. If you thing enough people care, organize it yourself.
I don't even understand how photos are less invasive of privacy. I try not to be too weird about it, but overall I dislike getting photos taken of me. Why should I put up with that if I want to participate in a hobby?
These kids have been on camera since they were in the womb. The delivery had a pro videographer. Parents had baby monitors with a video feed, later a nanny cam. Schools had cameras in the classrooms and busses from before first grade. Higher grades onwards all their peers had smartphones and social media accounts.
Some middle aged dude who doesn't want to be on video makes no sense to them, like that weird uncle of yours who in 2010 had no phone or email address.
Sadly the problem is only going to become bigger with upcoming smart glasses once masses adopt it, everyone will be recording each other without consent.
In the event of litigation (in court or in the public sphere), one would be at a disadvantage if they don’t have video of their side.
Like how you should have a dash cam for your side in a vehicle collision. Although, maybe sufficiently convincing fake videos will make it a moot point in the future.
I think it'll just desensitize people. Long time ago a kiss on a movie theatre screen was enough to make people protest and leave in indignation. Now everybody is few taps away from hardcore porn all the time and not many people care.
Yeah, I feel like the new generation are recorded and published to the world literally on their first breath, right up until their funeral.
We had this idea that privacy violation is like pollution. But now it's like how our generation is used to plastic in the ocean and never seeing all the stars. It's just life.
I think there is an age range where all this "posting" has been normalized, but outside of that generation it's not appreciated. I'm old enough that this kind of shit is still taboo to me, and I know my young kid and her friends are all deeply aware of who's being photographed, and what to share online and what not to. All the kids seem to deliberately distinguish between photo/video of objects and of people around them, when they go to post things. They're definitely aware and careful. It's this middle age range of maybe 25-45 year olds (?) where a sizable number of people are just careless or even accept casual posting of other people's photos and video.
I don't think its so much an age thing. Plenty in the younger generations are more careful what they put online than older people, because they have grown up/are growing up in an environment where it's a thing actually happening and they see the problems, and "I (believe I) can legally do this, so I will do it and don't care what you think" is a common attitude in older generations too, combined with lack of belief in the harms.
I think the generational fracture may cut the other way. My impression, consistent with the polls, is that the younger generations are much more willing to embrace authoritarianism when it advances their personal values and interests. They think that the threat of violence from the state to prevent others from forming an opinion of them based on information they don't control is perfectly acceptable. Laissez-faire is passé.
I'm a youtuber to support my programming project, and I see many people in my situation being a lot more shy about doing that. It's a lot of work to do it properly and takes dedicated attention to not have your parasocial community turn sour or vicious on you: it's no joke.
I wonder how much of this is people expecting that ANY media presence will throw them into the troubles people experience when they have all the media presence. I know if I blow up big enough (not much of a threat right now) that someone will come to hurt me, no matter how I am. That's not about me, it's about statistics. If I blew up that big I could probably afford security…
I think some people assume you'll be confronted with that sort of problem right away just by appearing on youtube etc. Sure you will… eventually. Or if you're staggeringly unlucky.
From a professional perspective, I never worried much and I'm pretty sure it helped me. But I totally understand if there were/are people who are very concerned about putting themselves "out there" when there is at least a remote possibility of some offhand remark or paragraph costing them their job.
> There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
And there's such a focus on the law and expectation of privacy in public places in these comments. There's a huge difference between someone complaining about being recorded in a small hobby community and complaining about being filmed on a public street.
My theory is that those "you just have to accept it" people are unwilling or unable to confront their own wrongdoing. Out of principle, and also triggered by the recent "AI uses all data available" situation I've tried to voice my disagreement when someone was talking a foto of me. The reactions were all around the same: Nobody was willing to just say "Sorry, of course thats your choice". everyone had some lame excuse or was trying to pressure me socially. "But my brother is deaf and just wanted to show it to his friends". As if I care if someone has a disability or not, especially since I am blind myself.
To sum it up, in my experience, people are just not willing to respect your boundaries if you make them aware they overstepped yours. They will always go for some excuse, instead of just accepting they erred.
I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on? Who's to say how much of you I have in the shot? Do you feature? Did you flash by? Are you blurred? Recognisable?
I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.
I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).
Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.
Just as the author says: “Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me.”
It doesn’t fall to the legal level, but a social rules level.
People who obnoxiously recording people in public, even if 100% legal, and disregard the wishes and conform of others around them deserve social consequences.
Some things should only exist at the social norms level. IMO it would be hunky dory if societies considered what “privacy in public” looks like in the modern age, and came to the conclusions like “no dragnets pls”.
You've got a very large, diverse population without a strong social identity and ever-fraying trust. So you won't consistently get basic human decency any longer. That's something which is extended to the in-group with which you have real social ties and obligations. Most people don't have this any longer.
While I think we all agree that this is crucially important, for many of us the affront to decency is not the capture of photons that have previously bounced off someone's skin, but the very idea that that person has a claim to those photons in perpetuity.
I think it's indecent to suggest that someone needs to avert their gaze (or in this case, their CMOS sensor) because I happen to be in the area.
I have no problem with that, but there are a lot of commenters here arguing that it should be enforced at a legal level, rather than a social rules level.
For a forum that tends to trend libertarian, I'm genuinely surprised by the level of enthusiasm for using the government to police the photos people take and share of people in public spaces.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.
I can understand some people preferring not to be filmed in public or shared commercial spaces, but ultimately if you are truly in public then being photographed or recorded is just part of the deal.
I don’t think some people have thought about the second-order effects of things like requiring model release forms for everyone who enters the frame. Imagine getting a ticket or being sued by your busybody neighbor because you took a video of your kids in the backyard and they walked past. Laws like this are frequently abused by people who want to wield power over others, not simply people who simply want to protect themselves.
When you extend the thinking to topics like news reporting and journalism it becomes obvious why you don't want laws requiring everyone to give consent to have video shared of themselves in public: No politician would ever allow footage of themselves to be shared unless it's picture perfect and in line with what they want you to see.
>I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.
I don't know about that. Aroudn this time was the peak of "Glassholes" for those who remember that phenomenon. People really didn't want someone to be potentially, passively recording their conversation. Would that not be a thing should Google re-launch Google Glass today? That might be a real factor given how Meta is trying to push AR glasses.
I don't think the author was arguing at all that these things should be illegal, more just that there should be more consideration of other people's preferences where possible.
It's also legal to play an annoying song on repeat all day on a quiet hiking trail, but people (rightfully) recognize that as improper socially.
> I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic.
My very very strong gut feeling is that this is an influx of bots muddying the waters of discussion in concert with the unleashing of the secret police force that is ICE.
It seems to me that every real person sees the crucial importance of public photography in peacefully maintaining accountability.
Part of the issue is, big portion of the footage being recorded, is not worth recording, let alone publishing. (Except for personal value of the person recording, but that doesn't require public sharing)
With the OP example, people getting recorded are not bystanders catching stray camera focus, they are the subject of the video. Without other participants, there would be little 'content'. Imagine going to an indoor climbing venue, recording someone else, and publishing just that.
Not to mention "auditors", whose goal is to use the ambiguous nature of feels-like-a-privacy-invasion-but-legally-isnt when you stick a camera in someone's face in a public place to try and get a rise out of people and prance around as victim.
I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes
You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.
We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?
The author suggests this was not a public space. Legal or not, it's more about not being a jerk. I think this is especially important in the context of a hobby, and the local community around that hobby. There are easy ways for everyone to get what they want in these situations.
So, why not get a release? Why not perform some light video editing to cut/blur out people who don't want to be there? These are not high bars to clear. I've done similar things, you have every opportunity to talk to the group and sort this out, and explain why you're filming and where you're publishing. Then people can come to an informed decision...
I think the context of the original article is important: at an airsoft range, you’re on private property. You’ve signed a waiver to be there, there’s already rules to follow. Having formal rules for filming would be a totally reasonable and practical thing to do.
Just like some gyms are accommodating to people filming TikTok’s and some aren’t, an airsoft range could have camera or no camera days, if that was something their players wanted.
It's always a possibility that the owners of the range have already considered this and found there is virtually no market for no-camera days. Excluding your most enthusiastic members to include a miniscule number of camera-shy weirdos is unlikely to pay off.
The venues for these things are private and so they can set their own rules. The author proposes a rule: A simple purple lanyard indicating that you don't wish to be included in the published film.
This doesn't necessarily need to be an article, because the author could have just handled it with each venue individually, but this just gets the conversation going about general sentiment and wider applicability.
My guess is that early on this kind of youtuber was relatively rare and so being captured occasionally wasn't a big deal, but that now the trend is catching on, a it's happening regularly and becoming a concern for some people.
The author is a tech lawyer. I think the article is there to start discussion. I agree with him that if private venues allow people to record like this they should offer, at the very least, an opt out. "Purple lanyard" seems like a good way. It's also a pretty easy spot in post production where you can either blur or cut as appropriate.
If you are doing it because you're a creator on YouTube and you are getting paid through views on YouTube, aren't you then required to get release info? If it's for personal use, sure thing, but when you are making money on it then you should absolutely get releases and default to bluring non-released individuals.
I think the bigger issue is that our laws (in the US at least) haven't really caught up with this gig/creator economy. It would be no different than a blockbuster film group filming a war/battle sequence and having to get permission ahead of time from the location and individuals.
My work will have signs up or ask explicitly if they are filming and intend to publish. If you go to a private org with the intention of filming, you should follow the same rules for a full-budget production group.
> If you are doing it because you're a creator on YouTube and you are getting paid through views on YouTube, aren't you then required to get release info?
The model release laws are usually tied to commercial use where some endorsement is implied.
That’s why your company must secure a model release when filming in your office: The material is being used in a manner related to the company and as an employee in the video you are implicitly part of that.
If the AirSoft facility was filming customers and using that footage in an ad, they would probably require model release forms.
There are freedom of speech protections covering the capture of likeness for artistic display, editorial use, and so on.
If the YouTuber made some video in this case as an ad for some AirSoft product and included other people in it without model release forms in a way that implied they were part of the endorsement, they could be in trouble. If they’re just making videos reporting on their games then I doubt there’s an argument that you could make requiring a model release, even if the channel was monetized.
This is also why news channels don't need to secure model release forms when reporting on public events. If we required everyone to do the model release form thing to show any video of them, you would never see any negative videos of politicians or criminals agin.
OP offers a reasonable idea of wearing a lanyard or badge to indicate you'd like to be censored out of the final video. that's practical and provides community enforcement -- for example if someone publishes a video with a subject like that, the community can shame them for it.
Blur the people who didn’t give consent. The problem is cultural, not technical. Even YouTube has the native ability to blur out faces at the click of a button.
The alternative is for the venue to have "recording time" and "non recording time." If you go during non recording time, you're not allowed to bring cameras into the space. And if you don't want to be recorded, you go then. And if you want to record, go during recording time.
Think of it like a public pool. It is unreasonable to say that there should be public pools that children aren't allowed into, but it's also unreasonable to expect all adults to want to swim with children. This is why we have the concept of adult swim time.
Here in Spain if you don't get explicit consent you can get sued for publishing the video (it's fine if you only showed it to the shop owner and didn't publish it), but if someone tells you explicitly they don't want to be recorded you have to stop and delete the video (I assume if you refuse they can just call the police, but I've never seen it happen).
Well, the first step is not being sued and taken to court, but receiving a cease-and-desist letter. But for that to happen, the person that has been videoed needs to be aware of that his face is on YouTube, which in most cases you won't even notice unless it's a video with a very high click count.
Stop taking video in public, or at least of the public. You just assume you should be able to do that and the whole world should adjust to your preference. Maybe it should be the other way around.
Do you also support a blanket ban of CCTV in public spaces? I am pretty sure that the bank had a camera in the ATM recording a public pavement 24/7 and nobody bats an eye.
Airsoft sites ban/allow videos in certain matches.
Not rocket science. We manage in public spaces like toilets ok.
They also point to purple lanyards in conferences and suggest an equivalent in Airsoft.
Why is this comment going back to zero? Does Hacker News not have the ability to move forward? Is this a central tenant to the nihilism worship that is Hacker News?
You can use AI to blur anyone that doesn't give permission. You can't use the excuse of "it's too much work!" It should be the law that you can't indiscriminately video everyone for your own financial gain.
Don't publish the videos unless you have a good reason to. There is no upside to just throwing everything you record on the internet. People don't watch the videos, your channel is degraded by having tons of garbage on it, and people in the videos don't want to be online like that.
If you stop pretending that a random video is somehow going to 'go viral' or make you famous, the entire problem just evaporates.
If you want to publish videos put the effort into making good ones that people will actually watch, which means raising the bar by (in part) finding people who want to be in them. Videos of random people doing pretty mundane things like their hobbies won't turn you into the next YouTube star.
Yes, this is what the author is concerned about. There’s a big difference between being filmed incidentally, and being filmed on purpose for the activity you’re engaged in. Being accidentally in the background is one thing, while being the subject of a video and having the camera aimed at you is another. Even though public photography is also legal where I live, and I believe we should keep that right, if I filmed close-ups of people in the car park getting in and out of their cars, I’d expect most people would object and find it uncomfortable.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
i think i would prefer this. i'd rather live in the world where no one can record or photograph you in public than the world where you're streamed or entombed in a vod for life.
Shooting video for yourself is one thing, sharing it to a third party like Google, MS, or Apple is another. Unfortunately many people have been brainwashed to not consider or even understand the difference.
I'm fine with being recorded as long as you keep it private. Not with that video ending up on your Drive backups or OneDrive etc, let alone YT.
This is drawing a very different line from the majority of conversations in this thread, I imagine.
"Sharing with a third party" because you have phone backups enabled is very different from streaming live or uploading to social media, like most are actually discussing here.
I think there is at least something of a middle ground for almost-but-not-quite-public spaces and events. In this case the author is talking about airsoft games; it seems totally reasonable for the venue or organizer to enact policies, whether "no cameras allowed" or "purple helmet means don't show / blur this person".
In fully public spaces I think we're pretty much out of luck, though I do think that laser/lidar-based countermeasures should be legal.
If AI photo/video generation continues to improve then it shouldn't be a problem as the photo/video taking culture will most likely die off once people assume any photos/videos they see are generated.
> Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
> We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
Heh. As a photog I've have plenty of similar run ins with people...but only when wielding an SLR (or similar). Was once standing on a sidewalk, saw a building that looked cool, took a picture. I'm more into architecture than people. Security comes out from the lobby to accost me. I very politely told them "Dude, I'm on the sidewalk, you can't do shit"
I also had the local transit agency threaten to call the cops on me for taking photos. Literally of just the platform and rails (without people) when I was trying to document the system for Wikipedia. Even though on their website it EXPLICITLY states that what I was doing was within their rules. Ignoring the fact that it was totally legal regardless.
That time I just (metaphorically) ran away rather than dealing with a belligerent station agent. Was what I was doing wrong? No. Was it legal? Yes. But did I want to deal with the transit police? Nope.
The thing that drives me batshit nuts is no one seems to care if you're taking a picture with a phone. The latest iPhone have megapixel counts in excess of many DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I can be way more sneaky with my phone. By using a DSLR type camera I'm being very public that "Hey, I'm taking a picture here" that should assure people, rather than scare them.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
This seems reasonable to me. If its airsoft, how many people are involved? 10? 20? Just go around and ask people if they will allow you to post video of the game with them in it.
The the author of the article wasn't in a public area, but in a private area at a private event, perhaps model release forms are a really good idea for participants.
Well the majority of the facilities are private land, right, not public, right? Organize formal sessions during which photography is prohibited. If you don't get any takers, the sport might have left you behind.
The alternative is not uploading video of people doing a hobby.
I don't think your situations are the same as someone appearing on some youtube channel without their consent every single week unless they opt out of participating at all.
If I see someone filming me while driving I usually give them the finger. I suppose that's my consent for them to do whatever with it. I don't foolishly believe they can't do it, but I do suggest maybe they shouldn't.
What if there was some sort of middle layer escrow holdings platform for users to sign up to that has your identity, facial biometrics, and crypto wallet. The user can also specify how they want their likeness used, or if they do not want to appear, etc.
Any user uploading to a video platform has to run their video through this integration user-facial detection layer at some point in their editing pipeline. Payments are made accordingly.
>I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
Not every thing has to be recorded.
It is like all those runners and cyclists who log and share all their runs/rides on Strava without even taking the time to figure out if it really serves a purpose other than a vain attention seeking.
In Germany it's generally illegal to film people apart from certain exceptions (mostly public events and public spaces). Even when filming something in public, you must be filming the event/space and not a person or group who happens to be occupying it, which is a fine distinction. Even surveillance cameras have strict requirements to be legal. You don't want to be the guy who goes to jail for having a surveillance camera, right?
Tangentially, nightclubs put stickers over your phone cameras and that is a great idea.
Good to know you reside on the other side of the planet. I wouldnt want to meet you in public under any circumstances. So much entitlement and disregard for other people is sickening.
There are a lot of '1A' auditors on youtube. They can be nasally and annoying but it's hilarious how often people go into a rage that they're being filmed despite the fact the people getting angry are doing the same to everyone else.
Back in my day shakes first there were places where someone could do things that would normally be mildly embarrassing because they were in a supportive community. In this example, it could be playing pretend and possibly saying goofy things or falling over and tripping or getting your butt handed to you by someone half your age or something.
When I was young, it would have been playing open mics as a teenager. I wasn't amazing but it's really important to play publicly in order to grow as a musician, and that means kinda sucking in public. I would not have become a musician if I didn't have that supportive community.
In this day and age, if I were to do that, someone would probably live stream it or film it on their phone and put it on YouTube, then It would get found by the kind of awful kids that like to make other people feel awful for no reason, then they would have found my like Facebook or social media or something, I'd catch shit at school, and I never would have touched an instrument again.
So yeah, save your highlight reels for someone else, thanks.
It may be an exaggeration but it feels like half the problem with the internet has been this sort of “dunk culture” that’s proliferated in the past 10-15 years. How heinous is it that anybody can gain significant notoriety by just providing a steady supply of innocent people to lambast?
I would also push back against the whole "this is just being perceived in public" thing, because you're not consenting to being perceived by the entire planet, you were consenting to being perceived by the people present and in the community. Like if there's a bully in the community, the community can do something about it or you can at least avoid them. Like you are consenting to interacting with a culture of like-minded people, and you know they're like-minded because they all showed up to the same event to do the same thing. That is not true of the open internet.
I feel this has some parallels to concerns over house/porch cameras which are proliferating these days.
I have no problem with the idea that everyone on the street is recording from their porch... as long as it's for their own siloed use, and it takes a conscious act for them to share it. If someone wants to stalk you, they'd need conscious assistance from your neighbors. If the police are tracking a hit-and-run, they need to ask people for footage during a time period, etc.
But the moment someone says "hey let's network all those with object/face recognition so that you can easily trace every person walking down the street", then we've got a problem.
I agree that we need a renewed social agreement on "no perception of privacy in public" concept now that cameras are everywhere, are smaller than a pinhead, and cost pennies .
Laws aren't sacred, they are just the rule over the living by the dead. All of our privacy laws were made when the technology , culture and demographics were completely different.
It is funny how insular and US centric many of the comments here are. In fact many countries do have legislation requiring consent in many scenarios for photographing or publishing photos. And it turns out that it is not actually very problematic.
I don't think the law is the issue here. Stuff like #metoo shows how devasating effects can be even if you eventually sue and win. And the audience sentiment never really changes because they never come back to the story.
Mix that with the lack of general shame for this stuff and you have this weird state of affairs where you don't want to do anything slightly risky. Nothing silly, nothing that can cause you to be looked over on job apps, nothing that you enjoy by yourself but others find "weird".
Because the US has other laws that make the kind of laws you're talking about very difficult. You have to look at the laws together as a part of a system and not a one off set of actions.
In addition laws in the US tend to protect the rich very well and get wholesale ignored for the poor. That is Jeffrey Bezos will punish you with the full extent of the law for taking a video of him beating a baby fur seal to death with a bat, while star-wars kid will be begging for venmo donations in order to get thousands of copies of video taken down while law enforcement ignores the situation.
2. Recording people without their consent still happens in lot of other countries other than the US. I bet I'm in tons of YouTube videos showing skiing in the Alps.
I mean there is a "photo release" or "Model Release" contract used often when taking pictures in any private place that grants the right for the photographer to use those photos.
Not really, other European countries also have the "don't participate if you don't want to be filmed" mentality.
E.g. author says:
> But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conference
I've been to many such conferences, and they all make it very clear that all the photos can be taken and used in advertising by anyone, both in agreements as well as entrance banners. Same as in US.
Some conferences I've attended provide stickers to put on your badge and if you don't want to be photographed/published the conference organizers may pay attention with respect to their publicity photos. Of course, others snapping pics with their cell phones may not. (And, in Germany as well as other countries, I've never seen explicit warnings about not publishing photos of people at a conference without permission.).
Most people are pretty reasonable and aren't aggressive with their picture taking. But there are almost certainly photos of you online whatever the local country laws may say.
I agree a lot with the sentiments here and I think people who want to avoid being filmed should have that right. But, as someone who doesn't mind (and is younger) I suppose I could share my rationalizion for it (as flawed as it may be)
One often mentioned reason is the fear that in some way your likeness will end up in something significant, or viral. That makes sense, it's the most invasive and significant violation. We "risk becoming the side character in someone else's parasocial relationship" as another commentator mentioned. I myself wouldn't want that either, but I derive some comfort from one main observation: virality doesn't scale. A lot of the worries come from the fact that "everyone is filming now", "everything is shared now". That's true, but the likelihood of any of this ever becoming popular or even seen goes down as the volume goes up. That alone is enough for me to not be that worried, at least not by the increased prevalence of public filming/photography.
On the other hand, this does nothing to limit the effect of data harvesting and government espionage, a real worry I might have.
It's interesting that you mentioned being younger. One thing I've noticed is that as people accumulate different experiences and social groups (not necessarily just because of age), they often develop different "personas" depending on the environment. In one setting, you might be an enthusiast sharing a video about a hobby, while in another you might be a CEO interacting with your team, shareholders, partners, or customers where you naturally behave differently. The challenge is managing these "many worlds" without them colliding. One solution that's becoming more feasible now is the ability to modify your appearance and voice depending on the context.
The thing that I find more frustrating than anything is photos of children. I'm not so bothered about myself.
I have a young child - he's two and a half. Most people are considerate and ask if it's OK to take a photo - and I generally say yes if it's friends - but we were at a wedding recently and a staff member, total stranger, at the venue was laughing at him running around and asked if they could take a picture, and then got stroppy when I said no. I just think it's quite strange behaviour to want to take photos of a child you don't know. It's quite different to the professional photographer taking photos for the hosts in my mind, which you basically accept by bringing your kids to an event like that.
A mum at a playgroup just took out phone and started filming my son playing with her child. My wife asked her to stop and she again got quite stroppy, even though the group explicitly said that photos should only be taken with consent in that space!
It does yes but more like in a bad mood. A teenager who is rolling their eyes and making a comment because they’ve been asked not to do something could be described as having a strop.
It's really interesting that the big objection is really about sharing the resultant video (widely).
I actually feel the same, I don't really mind if I'm at the gym and in the back of a video someone's taking of themselves to review later to take notes on their form. I actually do kind of care if it gets posted to YouTube and now 100,000 people have seen me covered in sweat or struggling with something or whatever. It's something that's technically 'illegal' in a private space here in the UK, so why do we all just accept/allow it anyway? YouTube or Instagram could easily work out if the video was taken indoors and show a 'are you sure' message.
Just a thought. It's not that big a deal, of course, though to some people it might be (for good reasons).
If my kid is on some fun Disney ride, and I take a short video of them, and also there are some other people in the background or also on the ride, I would still fee comfortable sharing the video. Well, I wouldn't, because I don't put videos of my kids online, but if I was comfortable doing that, I wouldn't feel deterred by the presence of others.
But also, if someone else takes a photo of my kids in public (or at Disney), I would feel somewhat uncomfortable about it, and I'd feel even more uncomfortable about finding that photo online.
I don't know how to square that, ethically. Sometimes I see posts on Reddit that go "hey, I was out at the beach, and I saw this couple proposing, and I got this amazing photo of it, does anyone know them so I can send them a copy," and I think "you just took one of the most important, intimate, private moments of this couple's life and posted it online without their permission," but it doesn't seem to upset anyone because the couple will look really great in the photo. Does that make a difference? I've got no answers for this, just questions.
I think conversation gets more telling if you include some more protected groups like children. And then more slightly more intimate places, like say pools or beaches and expand it to proper zoom and telephoto lenses.
Is there still in those case no expectation of privacy? Where exactly is the line? Maybe changing rooms and toilets are not public places anymore... But is the line really that clear?
I encounter people taking pictures, making video calls, and recording insta/tiktok/whatever videos in the gym changing room all the god damned time. I keep telling people to stop, but not once has anyone responded with "oh sorry". A belligerent "why?" is the most polite response I've received.
Genuinely curious: what concrete negative consequences are there from appearing in the background of other people’s photos/videos, in a full face mask no less?
Is he afraid that someone will be able to identify him as engaging in a hobby that some people might be judgmental about, e.g. a potential employer finding the footage and concluding “this guy spends lots of time and money playing a children’s game; he’s clearly not a serious person.” That I can understand.
But it seems like his position is stronger than this:
>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
So essentially, it’s wrong to publish any photo that happens to include people in the background? If I take an artistic photo at an art museum [0] or a restaurant [1] or a streetscape [2] and there happen to be people in the background, what possible harm could come to the people incidentally captured?
It isn't necessarily about consequences. I don't want photos of me on the internet. I don't like the idea that other people get to do that without my consent.
I don't have any power to stop it. I am not even sure I should, or what limits it should have. But I don't think I should need to justify that as a preference.
> Genuinely curious: what concrete negative consequences are there from appearing in the background of other people’s photos/videos, in a full face mask no less?
How about if you're overweight, doing airsoft to try to get into shape, and bellyflop into some mud on video?
That's social media crack right there, boys and girls.
Can you understand why someone might not want that kind of thing posted?
You're looking for a generic reason, I think, and there isn't and doesn't need to be one other than "people can desire their privacy for various reasons"
Maybe publicizing where someone is every week lets criminals plan their crimes. Maybe it gives away someone's location to an abusive ex or family member or stalker. Maybe people just don't want Google and the like to have even more data about our whereabouts and actions and identity.
These are all nice concrete consequences, but I’m not sure having public images meaningfully exacerbates them.
>robbers
Why would a criminal take time to comb through random, anonymous, uncategorized images of people to ambiguously identify someone who might not be home (and might not even have a house worth breaking into), when it’s much easier to just stake out wealthy neighborhoods and definitively see who’s not home and who has unsecured valuables, as has been done for centuries?
>stalkers
So said stalker would have to run facial recognition software on every image on the internet to find the handful that might incidentally contain their victim? Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.
>Google et al.
The solution here is to regulate what Google et al. can do with your data, not regulate what people can post online.
>>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
If you don't want someone to make a record of the photons that arrive at a particular place because those photons bounced off you, then don't let them go out into the world far beyond your private space.
Why are you trying to dehumanize the idea of taking a picture of someone and possibly posting it publicly by referring to it as photons? Yes we are all just atoms moving around in 3D space but it doesn't take away the fact that people should be allowed to exist outside their house without some random person recording them and possibly posting it to the internet. You don't care and that is totally fine but some people do.
> There has been no “put on this purple lanyard if you don’t want to be included in the public version of the video” rule, which I’ve seen work pretty well at conferences I have attended (even if it is opt-out rather than consent).
This bothers me. The default should be not including people, and instead offer lanyards (or whatever) who want to be included.
I had this when I rode with a motorbike group. It was a loose collection of people that rode a specific route on the weekend.
I only went a few times, but it was obvious the people with the cameras were looking for interesting content and drama. I cut an open corner and ended up in the highlight reel as some example of what not to do. Even though everyone there was 50% over the speed limit and riding “dangerously” in the eyes of others, what got put on the video was the interesting stuff. And of course, you never got to see the speedo of the camera man as he went 2-3 times the limit.
Another biker I knew said he didn’t ride with those guys because they’re just out there to bait for content.
We, a group of people living on a street where we get a lot of dangerous motorbikers passing our homes, started collecting these video's recently.
Our goal is to get the roads closed for motorbikes, place bike-repelling infrastructure and to have police involved in the many cases of one-sided accidents. For that we need to convince local governments that motorbikes are misbehaving.
So we now sift through instagram, youtube, etc to find such video's you mention where they ride "our" roads. Or where individuals that we've seen riding our roads misbehave in other places. This is obviously nothing "legal proof", but it's a growing dossier. And also a clear reason why someone may not want to be filmed.
In one case, a motorbike lost control, narrowly missed a thick metal bar and plowed through two front yards of neighbors. Police was involved. We managed to find this individual on several other such videos clearly racing way over the speed limit. He lost his drivers licence. Not because of the video's, but they did help make the case this person was structurally misbehaving, not a one-time mistake or technical error.
---
Sidenote, to illustrate this is not a few "get off my lawn" people, but that this is an actual problem: These motorbikers are but a few dozen individuals over the year, yet their noise and the danger and agression towards others road users is out of any proportion. This is a quiet nature reserve where people come to run, stroll, watch birds, go swimming with family, drive grandma around, bicycle, skate, picknick. Where our kids play and where our teens cycle to school. On busy days there can be hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians in a sunny afternoon. The speed limit is mostly 30km/h (18mph), the road is 2.5 to 3m (8-9ft) wide, traffic from both sides. Motorbikers have been seen to hit 130km/h (80mph). Where children are cycling, couples are walking, fitgirls skating and so on.
I sympathise with this, people who are endangering others deserve consequences of the law. I live in a city near a straight road and often hear bikes step through 2-3 gears at night. I know how fast that is and it’s dangerous.
One of the reasons I stopped riding with this group was a few people there didn’t have a strong will to live and so adrenaline and confrontation was what they were looking for.
The specific route I mentioned though is 50km outside of the nearest city, through a wasteland and ridden at times to minimise traffic getting in the way. The best time was 6pm on a Tuesday night where you’d be lucky to pass anyone.
I would like to share an even more extrem version of this.
I come from a country that could be potentially affected by the Russian-Ukranian war.
A couple of years ago, the government presented a program for volunteers, consisting of a military crash-course over a weekend to get to know the basics. Military service is voluntary in my country, so I thought it might actually be a good idea to have had a rifle in my hand at least once. You never know.
So I decided to sign up and got a few documents to sign. One of them was explicit consent for the organizing party to use any pictures taken during the training in order to use it as promotional material. No opt-out possible.
You understand? They could take pictures of me during a voluntary training, and post them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet!
I even sent them an email asking to clarify and if I could opt out. They refused and would not allow me to participate if I didn't accept.
They make PLA ones, advertised as biodegradable, but AFAIK the settings for them to biodegrade never happen in nature, it's ever so slightly better than the alternatives but far from perfect, or even good.
> PLA is only biodegradable under industrial composting conditions and anaerobic digestion – there is no evidence of PLA being biodegradable in soil, home compost or landfill environment.
I read up on PLA when I got my 3D printer because it's popular material for that. From what I understand, it's biodegradable above 50° C. Not something you'll find outside Death Valley. Still better than most other options, but it would be nice if we had something that was stable for weeks and then degrades nicely.
Not patronising, this was exactly my first (and off-topic) thought as well.
We have lived in our house for +15 years and we still regularly find small fluorescent yellow ball bearings in the garden soil from the previous owners family. These things are here to stay
I haven’t played with airsoft since I was a kid, but I remember the biodegradable ones back then had issues. They would fall apart when you shot em, sometimes deteriorate inside the gun and muck it up.
I wonder what would happen if someone wore a T-shirt with an ITAR restricted weapons blueprint on it or something. Hypothetically it would be legal to display that in public in the US, but illegal to post it publicly facing for foreigners to access on the internet.
Even if it were a gray area, the serious penalties would probably be enough to make someone want to blur it out.
> Hypothetically it would be legal to display that in public in the US
Would it? I'm certainly not a lawyer or ITAR expert, but I would think that if you walked through a public space where you couldn't positively confirm that everyone present (and everyone who might view it transitively via video recordings, live streams, etc.) was OK to access the materiel on the shirt, that would be considered an export and you'd be in big trouble.
I'm no ITAR expert either, but IDK how wearing a T-shirt could possibly be an export. My lay understanding of export is that the information would somehow have to leave the country; if someone looks at the T-shirt and transmits it out the country they'd be the exporter, not the person wearing the T-shirt. If someone records the t-shirt and transmits it, they'd be the exporter.
My understanding following Cody Wilson's lawsuit to publish gun plans online, which is a more recent case, did not follow that. He ended up having to follow ITAR export compliance, although he was allowed unlimited distribution to US nationals and granted an ITAR license that might let him export under the conditions of that license.
On remand to the district court, and on the eve of changes to the federal export regulations, the U.S. State Department offered to settle the case, and on July 27, 2018, Defense Distributed accepted a license to publish its files along with a sum of almost $40,000.[6][7]
Nowadays you'll find most gun plans end up on odyssee or surreptitiously on github or something like that. If you go to high-profile 3d gun websites they will almost always point you to a decentralized server that the government can't go after.
It seems maybe they might allow you to export it, but you'd have to get a license first, even if they were required to issue it to you could take years of lawsuits that a youtuber probably will not pursue?
I’m not sure if anyone has missed the delicious irony that airsoft is one of the rare sports where faces and thus identity is covered , pretty much the whole time. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a human face or anything identifiable in ANY airsoft video I’ve ever seen.
So while the author makes an interesting point about surveillance I can’t tell if he’s being ironic on purpose.
I always wondered: who is picking up all that plastic waste afterwards? Never been myself, but I was told 1000s of shots being fired during one session is not an exceptional case.
The author talks about "Running around in the woods" so I'm a bit concerned that this may cause undesirable amounts of environmental pollution.
I would bet that dumping a 747's worth of plastic BBs in remote UK woodland is probably not as bad as everyone driving their petrol-powered cars there.
Yeah unfortunately those BBs are going to stay there basically forever. Biodegradable means it'll degrade in like, hella hot temperatures that you'll never get unless there's a forest fire.
Plus side I don't think they degrade into microplastics? And aerate your soil! :D
Though water bottles is probably orders of magnitude more harmful to the planet.
Ask your teammates not to take videos, or find a different group or a different hobby. But since they genuinely enjoy posting the videos, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're probably the one who's going to have move on.
You're entitled to not want videos of you taken in public places showing up online. But you're not entitled to getting that outcome.
I expect an airsoft venue is actually a private space, not a public one. Airsoft but-actually-in-public would have people concerned about a terrorist attack, not being recorded for insta.
To that extent, the hobbyists who like to create content for the internet should be asking for consent since their footage, and arguably their clout, depends on the participation of everybody else in the group. Otherwise they're just traipsing around a private plot of land all kitted up but with nobody to shoot. If they're monetising that content then they are profiting from the OP's likeness.
This is not far removed from the (fully understandable) blowback on influencers recording themselves (and often other people for rage-induced clout) inside gyms. These are also not public places.
And they may very well have decided that more customers want to take and share videos, than there are customers who are bothered by it.
And nobody is talking about monetizing content here. There's no profit. If there were, that would be a different conversation obviously. But the post did not bring that up.
And also, some people could suffer real damages. Imagine if someone is lying to their wife about what they do on the weekend or about who they've gone to a conference with. Or imagine if someone has found themselves with dangerous enemies who discover where they go, what they do and with whom.
At the moment, these things are not the problem of the person taking the video
> Airsoft but-actually-in-public would have people concerned about a terrorist attack, not being recorded for insta.
I live in Taiwan. My friend and I were drinking beers by the river one night and decided to go on a late night bike ride, maybe 1am. We grabbed citybikes and tooled along the river, which in Taipei in many places is a nice bit of pavement next to massive mangroves and then the river itself. We were coming up on a brushy bit when a squad of completely kitted out soldiers came out of the bush with massive rifles, night vision goggles, full camo, geared to the nines. My buddy and I both nearly fell off our bikes and were immediately thinking the same thing: Oh fuck the PLA is here. Common knowledge is they'd come up that exact river and make straight for the presidential palace if they were gonna do their thing.
Turns out it was just very enthusiastic airsoft players. Apparently you can just play it wherever in Taipei, there's not really rules about it? So people play in the riversides at night.
Their kit was ridiculous. One guy had tracer pellets. They let us wear their night vision goggles and shoot trees. Great time.
They could also blur the requester's face for the second or two it's likely in frame in the process they're very likely already editing the video before posting
If the problem starts to become big enough, I'd expect airsoft venues to offer special streaming or non-streaming times, depending on which group is bigger. Similar to how Saunas offer special clothed or women-only days.
I disagree. It wouldn't be nice to solve it, because it would mean nobody could ever take a picture of anything where there might be anyone recognizable in the background, without getting them to sign some kind of model release first.
Is that what you want? For innocent photography in public to be essentially outlawed?
The one time I was accidentally captured on video, I was filtered out, but I actually wish I was there.
Many years ago, I went to a Green Day concert where they played 21st Century breakdown for the first time. There was a large video camera on a crane above the floor. About a year later, I visited a friend and we played Green Day's (then) new Rockband game.
I noticed that Tre's dance around his drums looked awfully familiar, and then at the end of one song, the camera focused on a statue next to the stage, that I was staring at before the show. My friend didn't believe me when I told him I was in the concert they recorded to make the game.
Unfortunately, all the people in the crowd were removed and replaced with faceless stick-figure-like people. I really wish my face was in there, because it would have proved that I was there, and give me something to look for when someone else is playing the game.
I do a lot of photography, including "street" photography, but I don't shoot photos of people. I believe that you should be asked for your consent to be photographed, and I tend to avoid social interaction whenever possible. I empathize with the author here. I would probably say "yes" in that situation, but I would also expect to be asked.
I also do occasional street photography. I'm opposite of your view. I don't ask for consent and take photos (even candids). People rarely have problems. If they have, they'll come and ask me not to include them in the frame.
In Netherland schools have to ask for permission to use photos of your children on social media or elsewhere. I have no idea if the same holds true for non-schools.
I think this is something you need to address with the owner or organizer of the event. If they say you can film, you can. If they say you can't, you can't. I imagine there might be sufficient demand for airsoft fights where video is not allowed.
Great points. With Meta glasses and other similar gadgets I think manual consent is not enough. There should be a 'protocol' to announce that you don't allow your images to be included in social media. I propose a QR code that would signify that you don't want to filmed. We need to push for legislation allowing (returning) such liberty. After such automated consent is legal it will be up to social media platforms to blur and anonymize individuals with such preferences. Finally we will have a job where AI could be put to good use!
The best answer is becoming comfortable with the part of yourself that enjoys your hobbies. Embrace it, let go of the anxiety. Strangers have thoughts like oceans have waves.
As someone who plays a lot of online games, there is a similar problem with streamers. While I don’t say anything I wouldn’t want to be recorded because that’s probably a good idea anyway, it is certainly possible I could end up in some kind a fail compilation or otherwise.
But I don’t really care, for one because the stakes are lower when it’s fully online behind a mostly anonymous account, but also because I am confident if anyone was actually watching a streamer in my game I would find out about it.
If the YouTuber at your local field was raking in views, you would probably know about it, and could you try to resolve it with them. Otherwise these videos are probably not being seen by anyone but their recorder.
I don’t know about the UK, but in the USA the idea of “if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces” is pretty regularly upheld in courts. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in a public space.
You might have some recourse if another person’s video singles you out, but just being one of the several people in an airsoft video, where your face is partially obscured anyway, isn’t much of a legal standing.
Yea, and in this case unless the property owner says no filming said person would have no legs to stand on.
In most 'fun' events like this with random members of the public said venue has a monetary interest in ensuring people can film in the vast majority of the cases. People go there to have fun, and sharing videos of said fun is but one more way to ensure they get future customers.
> I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly, I’d be hopeful that they would at least consider my request. I have not done this.
I've done this several times in various contexts. If you ask in a nice way, it usually works
If you don't ask, it's very unlikely people will have the telepathy needed to understand what you quietly want
For air-soft specifically it is also very feasible to wear a full face mask and become very hard for regular people to recognise.
As an avid beach volleyball player, every tournament and most league games have one or more people recording them with cell phones or go pros on tripods at the end line. Just part of the game.
Nobody bats an eye, I assume because we're already out in public, basically in bathing suits.
In Germany, they have to ask him for his permission. If he insists, the video has to get deleted. If they publish the video without his consent, he can sue them and – aside of deleting the video – they may face penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment, though both are improbable in that context.
Every picture of you posted publicly will eventually be linked to you. Probably by Palantir.
There's face recognition. There's gait recognition. There's inference of the likely participants from cell phone data and known movement patterns. Some of this is probabilistic but still useful. Even if the matching wasn't done at the time, it can be done later.
Last year I was at a concert hanging outside enjoying a J and my beer. Suddenly there were four young women shoving a phone in my face asking me questions. I was a deer in the headlights. Turns out they were live streaming and just talking to random people. It made me quite uncomfortable - who's on the other end looking at me? They were later live streaming from the pit...
Of course Ive had video cameras in my face before at concerts but they weren't streaming and the results were probably seen by very few people. Now its instant broadcast to whoever is on the other end.
I feel it spans way wider than just hobbies. For example, when people film in gyms, which is a private place. Or everywhere you go, there is a good chance you will be in someone's vlog/photo/youtube video.
I have the same issue with board gamers. Now, admittedly it isn't as intrusive as audio/video uploads. But so many want to record the game along with the names of the players. When I request they don't use my actual name and just put Player A (or whatever) they look at me like I'm a weirdo. When did it become weird to want as little information about yourself to be online?
A counterbalance is that there's such a colossal volume of new YouTube 'content' published every day that approximately no one will end up watching an obscure video with your cameo anyway.
I guess the concern then shifts to dragnet automated surveillance of it.
So sue. Don't expect legislators or online legions to protect you. Sue to protect others in the same situation.
The common-law tort of invasion of privacy grows to encompass new situations only through court cases.
Courts (i.e., judges) are not looking to create rules out of thin air, but look to reflect when expectations have changed in a way that tracks the principles behind the tort.
In this case, an initial historical period of permitting publication by default can be followed by a restrictive period of prohibiting invasions, based on the recognizing dangers from publication, e.g., permanent and lasting damage to one's business relationships through disclosing of embarrassing but irrelevant images.
To make law you have to get out of the realm of personal feelings and start expressing principles for the way people should live together.
We Brits don't speak up enough in general. An e.g. German would have no qualms about going up to the person filming and making their concerns known. That's exactly why it's become normalised
Also many people just flip out even about the most reasonable of requests.
So point blank refusal to listen to someone's concerns? Very on brand for the society we live in today. As long as something is legal, it's fine right.
Also not sure why you assumed there was any situation to be "defused". Weird. I guess you may be the type I referred to in my last paragraph
Posting videos on YouTube is commercial use. Even if you earn no money, the intent is almost always to “grow the channel” to the point where you can monetize it, sponsorships, brand deals, etc.
Commercial use in most jurisdictions is handled differently from the “free speech” exception. There are generous carve outs for art though. Which is interesting. If I sell a photograph it’s art but if I sell it to an ad agency for use on a billboard it’s commerce?
But the world we live in is so changed, it is a very recent change where taking a photograph was almost always a 1:1 photo to print ratio. It’s very new the idea that everyone is carrying around an internet connected video camera that can publish live to billions of people. This absolutely changes the calculus and laws should be updated accordingly.
I don’t know what that should look like but it seems we should acknowledge that this activity is primarily commercial (clout is marketing and/or brand value a/k/a goodwill in accounting parlance) and that laws intended to protect art making maybe don’t / shouldn’t protect this form of commerce as much as they seem to presently.
To be clear: if you are in public and someone takes a recognizable photo of you eg your face and uses it to sell perfume congratulations on being beautiful and also call a lawyer because that use is not protected just because you were in a public space.
But you can make a print hang it in a gallery and sell it for whatever price you want. (AFAIK). Maybe there’s more nuance— could you put it in a book of your work and sell it? On the cover? Make postcards? NFT’s (remember those?) etc.
Anyway there are already limits and we should maybe enforce the ones that we have in some of these circumstances. I wonder if it’s already happening- I can’t be the first person to view this activity as commercial right? There must already be precedent somewhere.
Just like how every YouTube gear review says “company X sent me this but they have no say and no money changed hands” is pretending it’s not a sponsored video. It’s absolutely a sponsored video.
1. You are paid for views
2. People watch reviews on “release day” aka embargo day
3. If you get the product later you will have less views and less money, and you will miss the window of product hype cycle.
So just like every not sponsored review video is absolutely sponsored live-streaming a kids birthday or whatever is commercial and you need model releases. I guess these people will have to post notice of filming warnings at the door along with the balloons.
Why is it considered acceptable to shed millions of tons of tire dust in to cities where people live and breath.
In the order of environmental issues, these plastic pellets are insignificant.
If you want to get up in arms about something, look at how many container loads of plastic feedstock falls off of ships per year and you'll see a problem a million times bigger.
On one hand: You are not nearly as important or meaningful as you think, and no ones brain will store and index your face for more than the length of the video. With online content the way it is now, you are a blade of grass in a continental sized grassland. It should be liberating to understand how little anyone actually cares.
On the other hand: The threat of being fed into a future AI-god is real, the the downstream effects unknown.
This is an issue a lot of gyms are facing; idiot "influencers" coming in and not caring who or what they film. It is really up to the private establishment to set rules for taking images and video within their facilities, but most will allow it because they want that almighty dollar to continue flowing in.
This is one of the reasons I use the free county gym — there are no influencers here (it's bare bones dudes slamming weights, only). I used to pay for a membership at a higher-end local establishment (and could still afford to), but got tired of all the glimglam of social gyms. The only thing I miss is the yoga class.
Is the airsoft range on public property? If not, you could probably complain to the owners. If its on public property then you probably can't do much about it except complain to YouTube and ask them to take it down.
>I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly
I must be living in a parallel universe of airsoft players. I can't possibly imagine anyone in that space changing their ways because somebody kindly asked them to
One time I rented and apartment (in California), and the agreement said they can make promotional media with me. I tried to fight it, but they didn't really care -- big real estate company is not going to redline legal agreement for me.
>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me.
Why?
I dont ask this dismissively. Im not suggesting he's unjustified. That's just the interesting question to me and the author doesnt explore it. I believe this feeling is a new trend.
I dont think people had these qualms, say, 20 years ago. The world was a very different place back then. At the end of the day I suppose it's because 20 years ago, even with a totally permissive policy, you'd never expect footage of you to reach any significant amount of people. It would rarely happen and when it did there wouldnt be a huge audience to share it with.
But does it go beyond that? Would people have cared even if it did reach a wide audience? Is it possible people seek more privacy and control over their image than before? And not just as a reaction to how global everything is because of the internet? Gen Z being afraid of answering phone calls, etc.
This strikes me as similar to the attitude towards phone number privacy. People used to publicly share their phone numbers by default. You were included in the phone book unless you specially requested not to be. Now it feels invasive for parties to ask you for it, even when they have some plausible reason.
1- ubiquity: now, virtually everyone's got a device capable of capturing high quality photo/video of you at any time
2- discoverability: social media gives anything the potential to go viral which might put you in the spotlight or limelight, and the frequency at which things can go viral "enough" is way higher (more platforms, larger follower counts, etc) (this is I assume what you meant by "reach")
3- "content creators" are everywhere: people want to turn anything into something, through all kinds of incentives that were unavailable 20 years ago, so it's a much more active "capture and use it" context
Things just aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
Perhaps it is a generational gap, but the idea that I have to justify NOT attempting to squeeze a hustle out of absolutely everything I do reduces my trust in any content generated in [current year] as nothing more but a carefully crafted advertising space.
> I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly, I’d be hopeful that they would at least consider my request. I have not done this.
I feel like the reasonable place to start is here no? Why write this whole post when this would probably be easier?
Even simpler, have a discussion with the group once and have cameras either be prohibited on all days except X, or allowed on all days except X, depending on the majority preference.
Maybe those who don't want to be filmed should be walking around with some portable LIDAR device, de facto breaking the cameras of people who don't respect their desire to not be filmed.
Google Glass has been a thing for 12 years, Snapchat's glasses have been around for 9. And you rarely see someone using them. (I'm aware of reports of ICE officers wearing the Meta glasses, but this is probably an extension of norms around police bodycams)
I relate some to the premise but for an entirely different reason than privacy.
Simply one of my less common hobbies has an incredibly high hit rate of gimmick social media accounts stealing videos for their own profit, with zero credit, while highly misrepresenting things. A problem not nearly unique to the hobby nor any one type of media, but a problem plaguing it nonetheless.
Its basically pushed an already obscure hobby even more so.
The author describes the sentiment nicely. I don’t like it, it feels icky but I also don’t ask people to stop. I just wish that culturally it wasn’t assumed to be ok by default
Social dance (swing, Latin, etc) has some of this too. I think generally where most scenes have fallen is “only film yourself and your friends, unless it’s something intentionally performative like a jam circle or competition, in which case go nuts.”
Not to mention EDM festivals. Remote bush doofs where everyone is off their chops, escaping reality, dancing during the day, exposed in the light.
Being recorded in 4k from different angles including action cams on people's heads on the dance floor, is a far cry from the relative anonymity of festivals of old. I remember when the only people who'd see you all bright eyed and bushy tailed were other participants in the party mayhem, which is how it should be.
You can always leave or ask the airsoft organizers to make new rules. The more interesting question is whether there's some legal avenue to avoid being someone's "content".
Reality TV has to get consent + releases so where is the line?
I have changed my mind on this topic recently. I believe that when you video in public everyone that gets videoed should require explicit permission or their face and voices should be removed. The only exceptions would be videoing public servants and if a crime is being committed. Videoing for private consumption would also be allowed in my opinion but not if it's posted in a way that more than a handful of people could see or if its uploaded to a site.
With AI this is entirely possible and if you are going to post videos on youtube or anything, you should be able to afford the removal of non-verified participants.
In Airsoft, there's a niche audience for people wanting to see other people get hit. Just like there's a niche audience for people who like watching car crashes. Just like there's a niche audience for people who like...
While you may not like being recorded, the player is well within their right to do so. Just label them a "mech" and award 5 points for the take down. If you have a squad of filmers, put them all together. Your problem is now isolated to the roaming mech beast in the woods. Flank right and live out your day.
Somehow you eventually have to square the fact that if you do things outside of your home, you are going to run into other people, who are very much going to do whatever they want, regardless of any existing laws, customs, or mores. And factor that into your decision making.
In the USA, anyone is allowed to photograph, video, or otherwise record anything they can see from a public sidewalk, subject to some soft restrictions like it being illegal to impede the movement of others. Any attempt by law enforcement or others to restrict this would likely fail in the courts.
Folks can get pretty upset by this in the real world.
The story is about a person on private grounds. They could talk to the owner and ask them to make a rule about no filming, but the owners probably like filming because if a cut goes viral on their airsoft grounds, it's like free advertising.
i'm not going to address the central complaint, but what i think is weird about this version is the venue: everybody is essentially wearing a disguise, and you could consciously disguise yourself even more with no inconvenience except less of a chance of being hit in the face with a paint ball
This behaviour is a thousandfold worse when you have kids, especially at social gatherings like birthday parties. Other parents (at least in my age cohort) assume it is OK to film them and post it to whatever social media they have without even asking.
Here in Germany we are about to start our daughter in pre-school ("kita") and every single parent had to fill out a few forms explicitly stating if they were ok or not ok with having photos or videos taken of their child (both by staff and by other parents).
Yeah, I am not looking forward to Meta glasses being widely used. But that is probably inevitable. Being anonym in public will be a dear memory from the past.
Agree with author. Laws do not necessarily dictate right vs. wrong. Filming others to publicly share that video may be legally allowable, is unethical regardless of the laws. It's like those crazy people who start playing their social media feed without headphones in public places like airplanes, or bathroom stalls....it's so weird, and annoying.
this is exactly about what is legal or not.
If I remember correctly in Germany there's a distinction about people being the focus of a photograph or people in the background. You can e.g. publish a picture of a public place without asking everybody on that place for their consent.
Another corner case would be filming police brutality. What if the police officers in question wouldn't like to be photographed being brutal!?
Local laws do apply.
This law badly needs to be updated to account for the fact that photo/video resolutions have massively increased since it was written, and "not the focus of a picture" is no longer enough to prevent you from being identified/tracked in the picture, which was the original intent.
Have you seen the cameras on cell phones compared to the cameras of yesterday? Resolutions are up but faked through software. A 640 picture from 2004 can be enlarged with clearer detail compared to a 2000px of today always looking sharp but never truly capturing a clear picture.
Private site. The event site could hold events where cameras are forbidden.
There are other examples like spas or swimming pools where cameras are forbidden.
Seems like the most reasonable answer would be to have days where no video was permitted, and days where it is. Then you can attend on the days where no video is permitted but the ones who like creating and uploading videos can have their chances as well.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
Not wrong, it’s rude.
Be nice to just live without needing to feel like crowd sourced surveillance all the time.
There's several caveats to this but generally it seems silly to me to worry about people posting pictures with you in it. It seems a bit selfish to me to be concerned about "your image" being out in public instead of living in the moment.
I think though, with the internet and social media came 2-3 generations that really wanted to share what was going on in their lives with other people and with that came harsh resistance to even being in the background of someone's picture.
I thought this post was going to be about not wanting to share their hobby in a blog, pictures, or video form. This is something I have struggled with, because I would like to get started with blogging and a podcast but I have held back because a lot of people are so mean and harsh with their replies and I tend to take things so personally that it really hurts and keeps me from doing it.
How does the new Denmark "copyright on your body, face and voice" work in this aspect? I read that the intention is to combat deepfakes but does it also work for uses like this?
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
We are getting monitored all the time, we are in an age where cameras are omnipresent. Everyone carries one in their pocket in the form of a smartphone, and countless stationary cameras are installed throughout cities.
When you walk through streets, buildings, and especially public facilities, you can see cameras almost everywhere. While it is often said that these devices exist only for security purposes and that footage is routinely deleted, this is no longer the reality. In many cases, people can request this footage through FOIA and use it as they wish, including uploading it to platforms like YouTube.
When I worked for a us company, as a European, i filed a foia.
And then a gdpr request from their eu branch.
Both were successful- i corrected some information i knew to be incorrect, and there are now signs by each 'hidden' camera.
I feel like I can't really have fun and be myself when I see people shooting video all around me.
I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.
This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.
I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.
This is a concern I also have in youth sports. People are filming practice and games then posting that on social media and sometimes the goal is to show their child (sometimes as young as 5) "embarrassing" someone's else's child with a move. It's unfortunately very common.
I think you can make arguments for and against the fundamental right to record or to not be recorded.
If someone is doing something bad/illegal, do we have a right to record/document it?
If I am outside minding my own business and not doing anything bad, do I have a right to not be recorded?
What is the difference between seeing and recalling something that happened vs recording? What happens when technology blurs the difference (for example if we all start wearing and using camera AR glasses)?
A purely technology-minded compromise to this question (aka how to support both the "good" and "bad" kinds of recording), is probably something along the lines of expiry and enforcing a lack of permanence as the default (kind of like, the digital age recording-centric version of "innocent until proven guilty", which honestly is one of the greatest inventions in the history of human legal systems). Of course, one should never make societal decisions purely from a technological practicality standpoint.
Since you can't be sure what is "bad"/illegal, and people will just record many things anyways without thinking too much about it --> then the default should be auto-expiring/auto-deletion after X hours/days, unless some reason or some confirmation is provided to justify its persistence.
For example, imagine we lived in a near-future where AI assistants were commonplace. Imagine that recording was ubiquitous but legally mandated to default into being "disappearing videos" like Snapchat, but for all the major platforms (YouTube, TikTok, X, Twitch, Kick, etc.). Imagine that every day, you as a regular person doing regular things, get maybe 10000 notifications of, "you have been recorded in video X on platform Y, do you consent for this to be persisted?", and also law enforcement has to go through a judge (kind of like a search warrant) to file things like "persistence warrants", and then maybe there is another channel/method for concerned citizens who want to persist video of a "bad guy" doing "bad things" where they can request for persistence (maybe it's like an injunction against auto-deletion until a review body can look at the request)... Obviously this would be a ton of administrative overhead, a ton of micro-decisions to be made -- which is why I mentioned the AI-assistant angle, because then I can tell my personal AI helper, "here are my preferences, here is when I consent to recording and here is when I don't... knowing my personal rules, please go and deal with the 10000 notifications I get every day, thanks". Of course if there's disagreement or lack of consensus, some rules have to be developed about how to combine different parties wishes together (e.g. take a recording of a child's soccer game, where maybe 8 parents consent and 3 parents don't to persistence... perhaps it's majority rule so persistence side wins, but then majority has to pay the cost of API tokens to a blurring/anonymization service that protects the 3 who didn't want to be persisted -- that could be a framework for handling disputed outcomes?)
I'm also purposefully ignoring the edge-case problem of, what if a bad actor wants to persist the videos anyways, but in short I think the best we can do is impose some civil legal penalties if an unwilling participant later finds out you kept their videos without permission.
Anyways, I know that's all super fanciful and unrealistic in many ways, but I think that's a compromise sort of world-building I can imagine, that retains some familiar elements of how people think about consent and legal processes, while acknowledging the reality that recording is ubiquitous and that we need sane defaults + follow-up processes to review or adjudicate disputes later (and disputes might arise for trivial things, or serious criminal matters -- a criminal won't consent to their recording being persisted, but then society needs a sane way to override that, which is what judges and warrants are meant to do in protecting rights by requiring a bar of justification to be cleared).
I think the laws around this are fairly antiquated. People should clearly have the right to photograph in public, however, I strongly believe that should someone take someone else’s photograph they shouldn’t need their consent to post the photo publicly or monetize it in anyway. Obviously, there should be some limited car outs like public servants in the commission of their duties, legitimate news organizations, use in court etc.
Edit: I don’t think k posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public, but rather anything the general public has access to.
I feel this about all of the AI notetaking bots that everyone is adding to web meetings these days:
“Welcome to the meeting. Your voice is now being recorded and sent to a server somewhere in the world to be processed by an AI and you have zero control over it. If we were to get hacked, it will be impossible to you know if your voice will be synthesized and used to scam, abuse, or any other nefarious purposes between now and the end of time. Happy meeting!”
I’ve seriously been in meetings with 3+ AI bots from different companies I’ve never heard of.
On the flipside, if I'm attending a meeting, I should have a right to my choice of disability assistance. I have glasses to deal with vision impairment, and notetaking assistance to deal with short term memory impairment. The AI is a part of cybernetic "me", rather than the platform.
As a street photographer this constant video/livestreaming culture shift in the last 10 years has made it really hard to not make folks uncomfortable when out in public.
Wow, such a nice idea with the purple lanyard it would be great to have something like this in general, walking down the streets someone films you and them or even YT or viewers to scan/flag the videos in question. I guess EU could put forth such regulation - no biggie. Maybe we could also create a framework on existing legislation - design a lanyard, put a QR on it leading to a "I do not consent" site. Advertise it a bit and I'm sure it would be newsworthy, at-least in EU, not sure about the rest of the world.
I think even better option is some type of public opt-in. Maybe purple or green screen lanyard. Publishing material of anyone without one would not be allowed.
Doesn't seem too big ask to edit out anyone who has not opted-in. Especially in age of AI that should make it trivial.
Sorry, but why even care about this? Is it an invasion of your privacy if strangers see you walking down the street? If no, how is strangers seeing you walking down the street in the background of some youtube video a privacy violation??
Well, actually this could be just a means of letting people know your preference without direct communication. Maybe it could fall under existing GDPR regulation, as an extended part about a public "non consent" marker.
How would you solve the problem in large scale, low effort way?
I agree with the author, and it Reminds me of people who video at the gym. I think it goes to a deeper issue in our society: people love taking video of other people, and then put them on the internet, which always runs the risk of being turned into a meme, etc.
I lament that this guy may have to wear a mask, And I wish more venues had no photography or video. The last thing I wanted to go to the gym and working out, and I accidentally glance over at someone, who videotaped it, and then put me on the internet with some caption..
Sometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.
I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
>I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
My first experience akin to this happened when I was at the grocery store during Covid. This guy stood near the checkout lines and just did a big arc with his phone filming all of us and mocking masks. Like the author of the blog sometimes I’m just like “it’s not worth it” but I had one of my kids with me and when I asked the guy to stop, he started ranting at me about how he uses an app that blurs faces, it’s a free country, etc. I just moved on but it’s like… dude, we’re all just trying to get through the day out here and I’m with my kid at the grocery store. Do I really need to be putting up with this crap?
I imagine if people actually start wearing any of these smart glasses in any appreciable number these experiences will be sadly pretty typical.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Well, here is the heart of the disagreement. I suspect everyone agrees that the social norms are "clear," they just vehemently disagree about what those norms are.
I don't know anything specific about the implicit cultural norms of airsoft, but it sounds like the author is playing at a privately owned facility which I would expect to have very explicit rules and liability waivers. I'd be surprised if those rules don't cover photography.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I find these kinds of argument somewhat odd, as they imply that "this kind of thing" is some unacceptable violation of clearly pre-established rights.
Rather, one must realize that existing in society always had the implication of being visible to society, and that public spaces are just that: a place accessible to all, where if you chose to be you must also accept being observed by its other attendants.
Some physical public spaces might be crammed so full of people that it's hard to breathe, while others will have them few and far in between. Some virtual public spaces might be breaking records with their viewer counts, others will never be graced with the presence of an eyeball. Streamers just connect a physical public space with a virtual public space.
Being recorded and published in a final edit of an on-demand video is slightly different (and not implied in streaming), but that is a much older dilemma that we have had more time to adjust to and hammer out rights regarding, and few would really pay attention to someone recording on the street with anything other than slight curiosity.
So no. I believe this is the society you must accept being a member of. The only thing that has changed with time is the medium (memory and word-of-mouth, paintings, photos, video recording and finallys livestreaming), not the actions. But as important, being caught on rando streamer's camera will by default only contribute about as much to your internet fame (and loss of privacy) as going to the local grocery store.
(For those curious if age contributes to the standpoint, I'd fall in the 30-40 bucket.)
Many people are claiming it is legal but it's not that simple in Europe and the UK.
It is legal (in most places) to film people in public but it is not necessarily legal to post the video to social media.
The Irish Data Protection Commission says:
> There is nothing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that prohibits people from taking photos in a public place. Provided you are not harassing anyone, taking photographs of people in public is generally allowed and most likely will qualify for the household exemption under Article 2(2)(c) of the GDPR.
> However, what you do with that photo can potentially become a data protection issue, for example, if the photograph, which contained the personal data of individuals, was sold for commercial gain or was posted publicly on a social media account. Under those circumstances, you are likely to be considered a data controller which brings with it a host of obligations and duties under data protection law. In particular, it would be necessary for you to demonstrate, amongst other things, your lawful basis for the processing of such personal data under Article 6(1) of the GDPR.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I feel the same way, but that's just not reality anymore. If you go outside your home, you're on camera. If your home faces your neighbor's door, you're probably on camera even in your own home unless you have constant obstruction of your windows and doors. I regularly see camera on apartment doors surveilling the interior of secure high-rise residential buildings. Guess you just gotta know when unit 18A takes out the trash...
This is mostly a joke, but objects in fantasy land are sometimes closer than they appear.
Major cloud compute and OS infra providers should provide a global opt-out of public bystander-recording. OK, record me, but it will be known by my face, location stamps from my device, etc, that it's me, and post-processing will anonymize me.
Legitimate public interest? EG, I stole your car and it's on tape? Sure, provide the cloud provider with a warrant for 'originals'.
This made me chuckle remembering the time a friend photographed a dog in a bicycle in Berlin and was yelled at by the owner until the photo was deleted. Photographing a pet crossed a big red privacy line. Seems absurd, but I think sensitivity to the phenomenon the author is noting will vary by country.
I feel like at least part of the issue is that the internet is a different kind of public than everywhere else. it's not transient, and it's not limited to the people who happened to be in the same part of public as you at the same time. instead it's a fully-automatable, permanent record that is 100% available to all present and future humans. that deserves consideration to my mind.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I think this is the rule that is currently under renegotiation in society. At one point you could imagine saying "I should be able to go out in public without having had a certain medical procedure (like a vaccine)." Now, I don't agree with that.
The overton window of behaviours is always shifting and not always in ways that we like.
I think the issue is "available to the whole world". "Back in the day" people would take photos or even videos (remember camcorders?) and it wasn't a big deal because well, only that person would have it and maybe show it to some friends or family (or give you a copy).
But now it means archived for the whole world to see, potentially forever. 30 years from now, someone might dig it up.
So it's not so much about the photography (which as someone pointed out, might be allowed in public places), it's about posting the photos/videos into a potentially eternal public archive.
This is a very reasonable concern in the general case, but airsoft in particular is probably one of the few social activities where it’s not entirely out of place to wear a balaclava and tinted goggles.
I don’t understand the author, everyone in airsoft wears masks? You’re an anonymous person, just a brief obstacle the cameraman shoots quickly on his way to the real fire fight.
It's a legally grey area. In most countries, you can't really stop people from shooting video and photos in public spaces. But you can do something about publishing the material. Most stock photography websites and similar websites will insist on permission from identifiable individuals in photos or videos for this reason. And a lot of conferences or fairs will give notice of the fact that there will be photos and videos taken at such events (thus clearly marking them as public events). I've seen that here in Germany at least.
And this is a sensitive topic here. Some people here get upset if you point a camera at them and will aggressively demand that you delete their photo. I've seen that happen a few times (not to me). Some people really get pissed off over this here and they tend to known their rights. So good luck arguing otherwise.
If you look at the rules here, they are quite sensible. You can't just publish photos or videos with recognizable people in them unless it's clearly a public event (like a demonstration, concert, etc.). Taking the photos is mostly OK (up to a point). And there's an exemption for private photos. But you can't just publish photos with people recognizably in them unless falls under the narrow set of exceptions to that rule.
Photos of people actually count as personally identifiable information under GDPR. So, people can object to that being stored by companies, ask for it to be removed, and companies need valid reasons for storing such photos.
In this case, the person is in the UK where people simply have less protections against this. Which is something the tabloid press there tends to abuse by trying to get photos of famous people in private / embarrassing situations by all means possible. That would be a lot less legal in Germany and expose you to lawsuits if you were to do that. The German tabloid press has a rich history of that happening.
In the US in most states it's illegal to monetize the image of children [without consent] unless it's just incidental to the film.
I'd imagine if 17 year olds were allowed you could make it legally dicy enough for someone that they'd not want to do it, if they were profiting off of it.
No alternative's being made. Only considering his own feelings, everyone else should follow. Expects people to not film (read: shoot) him because he asked. Neil's a bit of a Karen in this one I'm afraid.
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
This is not clear at all to me.
When you go into public you’re accepting that you might be filmed. The reality is that you are being filmed constantly. It’s just that it bothers you sometimes.
It reminds me of The Light of Other Days (a book about a society where technology makes any privacy impossible). Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
The good news about this is that hardly any normal person would ever watch these Airsoft videos for more than 5 or 10 seconds.
The evidence I present is that I have never seen someone complain about someone else filming in public. I’m not sure that the articles position on HN says anything about the majority opinion on a topic, only that it’s of interest.
So you only have to worry about consequences from not-normal people, and that's the good news?
EDIT: to bring a specific real-world example: A friend of mine does classes at a local studio that also offers martial arts courses, and some of the local right-wing bubble has gotten it in their head that this has to be "antifa combat training" and keeps screaming that this needs to be monitored. The current local government has been ignoring them, but a lot of people are probably quite happy now that there isn't an easy-to-get public record of who was there and "needs a visit".
It’s frustrating when there’s a problem and you know any solution to it is worse than the problem itself.
For instance, in my area we’ve recently had a couple Nazi demonstrations. People with swastika flags and “Hitler was right” signs. I’d like that to go away.
But to attempt to use law to do anything about it would mean allowing someone to choose what others can and cannot say in public. That’s worse, or at least at some point it will be.
This is very much like that (though of course far less nefarious) and you just have to let people take paintball videos. Imagine if we didn’t let people video anything they want in public. How many instances of police brutality would go unpunished. That’s worse.
My advice: start a paintball league and make that the rule. And yeah, it does suck to have to suddenly become an event planner just to not end up on YouTube but welcome to the future I guess.
I was having a similar discussion regarding the Renn faire this weekend. It's silly fun, but it used to be you could dress up as your persona and escape for a while (see also: larping, SCA, or really any number of similar outlets) . However now everything is being recorded, and those recordings act both as unwanted publicity and as a method of cultural mining and extraction
What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.
Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with
Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
Attention-seeking behaviors (such as an obsession with recording everything and putting it online) are unhealthy and a possible symptom of anti-social traits such as narcissism.
Unfortunately for all of us, if public-by-default becomes the norm, then this is gonna lead to even more social cooling, more conformism and less freedom.
worth looking into Camera Lucida by roland barthes, sontag's on photography and for something more recent, bernard stiegler's writings on cameras as technics if interested in some of the headier aspects of what cameras and photography do to culture and human relationships (as opposed to, say, legal implications). i tend to agree with the author: the presence of cameras in community spaces have completely ruined my relationship to those spaces. ive seen people here call the author a karen which, maybe, but the last time i went to a small DIY rock show in my community there were more people taking pictures than there were watching the show. what value is it if everyone films and uploads a set from a local band on youtube? what is the point?
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
In the US the legal doctrine is no privacy at all in public spaces (a lot more expansive than that actually), that's probably where those comments come from.
He acknowledges the issue in the article, but doesn’t seem to grasp it fully.
Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
I think this argument is logically flawed. When you say public means not private you are glossing over the fact that public never before meant "available via digital media to the world." Instead it mean a public which had a localized context. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but you're paving over this obvious fact.
But what practical difference does it have that it's "available via digital media to the world."? Are you just opposed to people not in your physical location seeing you? Why?
"noticing" is not the same as "permanently documenting and broadcasting to the internet". Used to be one needed to get signed photo releases from passerbys who appeared in your shots...
yep, it's the permanent nature of the recording put in to the public sphere that is the game changer for me.
I accept I am visible in public to all who share a space but I do not accept that the ephemeral nature of my existence in that space should be violated.
I've noticed that folks born after some point in the early 2000's tend to feel this way, and they don't even realize that the survellience in 1984 was meant to be problematic, or why it might feel that way to others
It seems that the panopticon has been normalized successfully.
I disagree. Filming Airsoft is no more intrusive than filming football matches or paintball. It’s a public-facing hobby where documenting the experience is part of the culture, and that’s a big reason the sport grows and attracts new players.
UK law already strikes the right balance: you’re free to record in public or semi-public spaces unless there’s a specific ban, while also having protections against harassment or misuse. That’s a sensible framework we should never dilute with “consent-by-default” rules, which would only stifle creativity and community sharing. If you join a hobby where cameras are standard, it’s fair to expect that presence, not to restrict others’ enjoyment because of hypothetical discomfort.
If you don’t like that, nothing stops you from setting up your own private games with different rules
I found this frustrating to read. First the other airsoft participates he seems to seem to be okay with people filming. There is clearly no expectation of privacy.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
>
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
I don't like it that things are recorded around the clock or by anyone and be broadcast anywhere, but the ship on this has sailed long ago.
> In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby).
>
> But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conferences, with people saying “Of course I’m free to take photos of identifiable individuals without their consent and publish them online”.
Again is there an expectation of privacy? Are people told that they are not allowed to use their cameras?
It is whether the is a expectation of privacy. A McDonald's or a Burger King is "private property", but there is no expectation of privacy. I would not expect privacy at an airsoft, paint-balling or any other outdoor activity even if it is on private property.
A public toilet cubical is a public place with an expectation of privacy.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
It depends whether there was an expectation of privacy as whether it should feel wrong. If there isn't an expectation of privacy. Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
> This isn’t about what is legal (although, in some cases, claims of legality may be poorly conceived), but around my own perceptions of a private life, and a dislike for the fact that, just because one can publish such things, that one should.
How else is this supposed to be tacked if not by what is legally permissible?
> There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.
> Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them. If someone came to Switzerland and started complaining that they can't install a doorbell camera, then it would also be a case of them 'not liking it' - but they have a right to voice their opinion.
> Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.
Obviously the law is different in different places.
However. The person is talking about Newbury which I used to live near, which is in the UK. So they are talking about their experience in the UK.
So the only law the is applicable here is UK law.
> The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them.
He specifically says at the end "This isn’t about what is legal". I also don't believe he understands the law, since he often conflates/misuses the use of term private throughout the entire article.
What he understands as private isn't what is understood by almost anyone (both legal and colloquially).
>There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
I had a guy at Walmart yesterday call the cops on me because I took a picture of the strip mall it was in on a small point and shoot and he assumed I was for some reason taking a picture of him, his wife, and kid. He was literally just a random car in the middle of a public parking lot. The officer talked to him and asked that I stepped away and then she came to me. The conversation went exactly like this.
Before she could even start to talk I told her I assumed that she knew that there was no expectation of privacy in public and that I could take a thousand pictures and there would be nothing that she could do about it. She agreed. She then asked if I'd like to give her my name (because she had no right to demand I do), and I said no I wouldn't like that. Then came the kicker. Would you like to just show me you don't have a picture of him. I said no I won't because I did nothing wrong and there's no reason for you to see my pictures. All of these were phrased as requests to bypass illegal search because she knew she was in the wrong even questioning me about it. People seem to really be the main character in the most boring story ever, at least in their minds. I have a healthy disregard for feigned authority anyway and was so indignant that I almost took some pictures of them while they talked. Trampling rights because Jim Bob is upset that someone dared take a picture in his direction rubs me the wrong way.
This. Im a dick and straight up demand people exclude me or stop filming. Consumers are ravenous for money making content and have no clue what a media business privacy, consent, and compensation legal framework even remotely look like. As someone who produced a few short documentaries in the early 2000s related to "hobbies", I would have never done so without full consent and compensation...
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
I play soccer. There are ways to bring people down a peg if they do anything flashy, disrespectful, etc. We're not breaking legs of course, but you'll feel it the next morning if you've been a douchebag to your opponent.
In this case, you have a gun. Surely you can find a way to ruin this guy's day. He won't have much interesting footage if the other team agrees to end his shit as soon as the game starts like you would the flashy winger with fluorescent boots trying rainbow flicks.
It's clear that "privacy " in public spaces requires a fair bit of entitlement, why can't we all just love one another and let it go? What harm comes from being in someone's cool AirSoft video? Is it just a matter of principle that bothers you or something deeper?
For one thing, the video might have objectionable content edited into it.
For instance, one video could be filmed by a genocidal maga nutjob, and a second could be a documentary about how PLA doesn’t biodegrade, made by a woke LGBTQ+ immigrant with a working understanding of chemistry, physics and biology.
Almost 100% of the US would be upset to know they supported the production of at least one of those videos.
That they're upset does not mean that the world should bend to their feelings. I think you would agree that getting upset does not necessarily mean something is wrong externally, oftentimes things are wrong internally. Thank you for taking the time to reply
> well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces
That's the correct answer. End of the story.
It is our consensus of what "public space" means and one can do with it (which varies depending on where you are) that forms a lot of our social norms and society. It is why hang drying clothes is acceptable/normal in many parts of the world but not in the US. It is why people are expected to wear at least some clothes. It is why you can take photos of random people, including kids, without their/their parents' consent in the US in public space.
If you think you are so special to never show up in a photo, don't be in the public in the first, or wear a mask, a hat plus sunglasses or something else. Celebrities have been doing this for forever.
Not the end of the story. Photographing where people do not expect strong assurances of privacy is complex to enforce. Try photographing inside a stadium, at the Olympics, etc. Others around you might be photographing, but security might ask you to stop or leave.
The right to take photos of random people without consent in public spaces, is NOT the same as the right to publish those photos online for the world to see and as a theoretically permanent discoverable archive.
I wonder if it's a generational or cultural difference present in the comments here.
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
I find photos and videos to both be invasive and unwanted.
I’ve been a member and gyms where the owner will start taking videos and pictures of the class that ultimately end up on social media or in marketing material. I’m not ok with it and I get incredible uncomfortable when I’m in some weird position to do an exercise and a camera starts heading my way.
Any time an unwanted camera is around there is some level of anxiety that starts creeping up. Maybe this is, in part, why so many of today’s youth have anxiety disorders. How can anyone just relax if they have to worry about anything they might say or do being on camera, and then posted for the world to see.
I was at a party not too long ago where most people were 45+, and some kids that were too young to have phones. No one was on their phones, and people seemed free to dance and whatever. The second one person took out their phone to take a picture/video the vibe shifted drastically, and the owner of the house told them to put it away, so people could go back to enjoying themselves instead of being worried about an embarrassing picture of video that might surface later.
I’ve seen so many good times destroyed by cameras.
I am assuming you have no good alternatives regarding your gym? Because if you feel uncomfortable with the behaviour of the owners, you should really vote with your wallet.
Classes are a different story, but at least for the legion of would-be gymfluencers that show up in gyms frequented by us zoomers, there's an easy solution: tell them to please not film you. If they don't comply, mess up their video. Deliberately walk across the camera. Deliberately get in the way. Take the machine against which they're resting a cell phone and start using it. Make funny faces. Whatever.
More people should understand you are no more morally obligated to behave sociably toward those exhibiting antisocial behavior than you are to stay your hand from a man who hits you.
Then there are those who film in the locker rooms which arguably should be reason to ban them from said gyms.
Imo these types should stick to "influencer gyms". They exist. Alphaland in Texas is a great example; a friend of mine frequented it as she started her bodybuilding page. Worked great for her. Just stay the hell out of the "normal people" gyms.
My kids are in elementary and middle school and there was an occasion where they were at a birthday party where an older sibling was live streaming the event.
Both my kids (and me) found it very off-putting, so there's some anecdata that at least some young kids still feel it's an invasion of privacy.
Maybe not all is lost.
There are lots of young people who have some conception and respect of privacy and there are people who haven't. That's not a generational thing.. It's just that those without awareness of boundaries have now all the tech that screams in their face to stream everything to the world without consent. I can assure you that still lots of young folks are annoyed by those people.
My own anecdotal experience is that the generational gap is actually the inverse of what was described above. Younger people seem to be very much moree acutely aware of the dangers of publicity and much more guarded about what they do in public if it could potentially end up online.
I’m currently wedding planning and regularly visit a wedding planning forum. I was left flabbergasted the other day when someone posted if it would be ok to ask guests to not post pictures of the couple on social media. They’re ok with guests posting pictures of themselves or of the venue and decor, they just don’t really want pictures of the bride and groom.
The response ranged from “you can ask but you can’t prevent people from posting” to “it’d be rude and inconsiderate to even ask”. One person even argued that it would be rude and other people would judge them if they went to a wedding and didn’t have a picture of the bride and groom.
I don’t think I ever felt the generational divide as acutely as in reading those responses, and I’m not even that old, I had social media when I was in high school.
This gets asked at basically every wedding I've been to in the UK i.e. there is a professional photographer, please don't take photos of the bride and groom in the church and it still gets ignored. At my own wedding, one of the guests (not even someone invited to the whole day, just a neighbour of my wife's parents who knew her growing up) is leaning out of the aisle with their phone taking photos ruining a load of photos.
It's incredibly frustrating. I also think it's really strange that when something happens in public, the default isn't to look to see if the person isn't OK anymore, it's to pull out a camera phone and start filming.
It could be more that those hanging around on wedding planning forums aren't really representative of the younger generation. If it's a wish of the couple, they should clearly communicate this on the invitation.
I went to a middle eastern wedding recently and they gave everyone these phone pouches to keep their phones in that were locked for the event's duration.
Honestly made the whole event better
If someone asks you not to record them at their own event, and you do, you're an asshole.
Anyone finding it rude would find themselves not only on the "formerly invited and definitely not welcome" list. But also on the "good riddance, it was nice having known you once" list.
People with such little respect for boundaries are just not welcome in my life.
I attended my first GenZ wedding a couple of months ago and they (someone on behalf of the couple) announced this request. It applied specifically to the wedding itself, not the post-wedding party (at the same venue).
Certainly the first time it had ever come up, but it made sense to me. If you're invited to someone's wedding, it's only natural to respect their wishes.
Not everything needs to be documented online!
Good luck with that. People like the spectacle, do it in court with a casual dinner, nobody takes pictures.
I'm from Gen Z and the idea of being filmed and published online without my consent sounds like a nightmare. It is my belief that it's an invasion of privacy (even in a public space) and questionable from a (cyber)security perspective. In France we got the Droit à l'image (Right to the image) which makes it illegal to post images or videos of people online without their consent, so that may be why that feels very strange to me.
Aside from the Eiffel Tower what actually benefits from that right?
In many ways an unenforced right is worse than no right at all.
And yet it happens thousands (or more) times a day. Even in the US there is the idea of publicity rights--I can't use an easily identifiable photo of you in an ad or other marketing materials. But posting on Flickr or wherever where someone hasn't shoved a camera in your face but you're easily identifiable?
Happens all the time.
France - where the 'Society of the Spectacle' was written by Guy Debord in the 1960s, where he predicted late stage capitalism as being mediated by images, so rather than reality, human existence and relationships between people are 'mediated by images'.
This is at the heart of what is going on. Society of the Spectacle is not an easy read, but it most definitely is pertinent to what is going on. Instagram is the final boss!
> I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I’d argue photos can be more invasive. If someone makes a 10 minute video and you’re somewhere in the background for 5 seconds, no one may ever notice. Furthermore, with compression artefacts for motion you may become difficult to recognise.
But if you’re in a photo, people will be looking at it for longer and are thus most likely to notice you and possibly zoom in on you with all the quality the static sensor provides.
Furthermore, photographs have greater potential to create false narratives. A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.
> A snapshot taken at the wrong millisecond can easily make you look like a creep or weirdo when a video would’ve made it clear you were just turning your head or starting a yawn.
Taking a screenshot from a video for exactly this reason is incredibly common. Look at any photograph accompanying a political story about a figure from "the other party".
See for example this Reddit post about the "triggered" meme origin: > Ironically, if you ever get a chance to see the video of this incident, this woman and the man she's speaking with are actually having a polite discussion. But... She has very animated facial expressions and the photographer just happened to catch this frame at an inopportune moment.
So it seems to me that since a video is simply thousands of photographs with a soundtrack, video is strictly more invasive than photography.
https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/adyt1d/comment/hvp04...
you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship
Your perception of this as a risk probably suggests cultural and/or generational differences.
But for the actual circumstances of the fine article’s author, video is a norm of the community the author seeks to join. Within the community, video is an established practice and making a video rig signifies a higher degree of commitment to the community.
Not accepting the use of video, is at least a partial rejection of the community values. Accepting video is a tradeoff for participating in community practices. The practical alternative is usually to find or build an alternative community. [0]
To put it another way, joining the bird watching community means keeping lists. Yes, of course you can just watch birds for your personal pleasure, but documentation is a core community activity.
[0] sure logically it is possible to change a community, but marginal members (e.g. new, casual, low status) are rarely in position to overturn established practice and run the risk of being set up for the agendas of established members.
> To put it another way, joining the bird watching community means keeping lists. Yes, of course you can just watch birds for your personal pleasure, but documentation is a core community activity.
How do you define community? Seems like a bit rigid of a implied requirement.
The whole idea of conflating community and publicity or some documentation requirement seems a bit silly to me, and it's definitely not rare, but an individual is perfectly within their right to go about engagement in their hobby with other people who have similar interests on whichever terms they like, which seems like community to me, as long as some form of commonly understood communication is present.
Likewise the people who do want to establish certain requirements, gates if you will, have the right to do so, but not as a whole. Country clubs don't and shouldn't have exclusive domain over golf, and I don't give the slightest fuck about recording myself at the bouldering gym or skateboarding, but that shouldn't prevent me from being part of either culture or community unless a specific club within those forms around publication.
I'd concede that it's possible that a community could exist in such a way that the act of documenting is the exclusive basis for which people are able to communicate at all, in which case perhaps that defines the boundary, but again it seems like it would be rare for that to be so pervasive as to encapsulate the entirety of a hobby.
I’m Gen Z and I get how someone could be annoyed by this, but it’s also just part of life. I get annoyed when people smoke in public or pointlessly honk horns at night. But you have to accept that being around other people means some people do things you aren’t a fan of.
> but it’s also just part of life.
It’s not, and your two examples are perfect proof of it.
Indoor smoking bans have been implemented in several countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans
https://health.ec.europa.eu/tobacco/smoke-free-environments_...
Countries applying the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic only allow honking in two specific situations. In addition, it’s culturally dependent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_horn#Regulation
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/perspectives/readers-views/the-...
Don’t assume something is an immutable part of life just because it was in place when you were already born. Change can and does happen.
Smoking in restaurants and bars used to be a part of life, until it wasn’t. It took about 5 years for that shift to roll out pretty much everywhere. And it’s so much nicer without it.
There’s nothing stopping us from saying this sucks, it’s socially toxic, and we’re not going to put up with it anymore.
That's a completely ridiculous comparison. Pointlessly honking or smoking does not create a public record of your activities shared globally without your consent.
Smoking in public has been banned in a number of large cities around the world and so has honking your horn when there is no threat to life.
>but it’s also just part of life.
Yeah? Who said that? Any selfish person can say the same about anything. "Yeah my dog shat your lawn but that's just part of life. Deal with it". What's part of life is different for everyone.
>I get annoyed when people smoke in public or pointlessly honk horns at night.
Yeah that's annoying, but neither the smoke or the honk are records of your private life published without consent on the internet, forever. So apples and oranges.
your way of thinking shows clearly your lack of comprehension on the subject... you didn't experience the world before the internet, so you think that the internet is "part of life". Let me tell you as someone that helped build it, that it isn't part of life. It's something that we made up, like our ancestors build the railways. Those were neither part of life. Unike the addiction to social media that was carefully engineered by top class psychologists, without anyone realizing. That shouldn't be part of life, but here we are :(
It is very much cultural. In the 2000's I moved from Japan where they're very strict about public filming/taking pictures (it's something you don't do, period) to the US where people were uploading photos to Flickr and tagging people there. Completely different worlds, and we're not even talking about Gen Z because none of them were old enough to be even teenagers.
That seems weird to me. I remember in the pre-smartphone days when Japanese were the nationality whose tourists were snapping pictures everywhere and group photos in business settings was the norm when Americans at least were sort of thinking weird but whatever.
It is not a generational thing at all.
There were plenty of TV shows centred around candid camera / security camera / home video footage back in the 1980s/1990s well before digital cameras or the internet was ubiquitous.
Or look at newsreels, or news reports from ... any time up to the 2010s. Obviously people's faces weren't blurred before we had the tech to do it. It's some entirely new, modern prissiness. It screws up the documenting of social history when you can't see any faces. There's been an internet fad for restored film of street scenes from 1915 or so: imagine if all the faces were blurred to protect the privacy of people who no longer care, that would suck.
I mean, I feel like the mindset of privacy and no one can have photos of me is a fairly recent phenomenon. Parents or grandparents definitely had books photos of everyone important to them and probably would have found it weird for someone to ask not to be photographed.
Watch any home VHS video from the 80s. Half the people the person holding the camera points it at say "stop filming me"
There's just always been people uncomfortable with it.
It is primarily a cultural one. You won't find many countries with the "well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces" opinion outside the anglo-saxon world.
The UK is a special place because culturally it belongs to the anglo-saxon sphere but legally it inherited the strict EU personality rights.
> The UK is a special place because culturally it belongs to the anglo-saxon sphere
I hear US culture is fairly dominant in the USA, too?
Every airsoft event I've been to has been on private property.
Solution here is to use a private airsoft field then make no filming a condition of entry. If they violate the rule, trespass.
It sounds like your solution is to /own/ the private airsoft field, not just use it.
That's the solution. You don't want to be recorded? Attend "no-recording" event. If there are no such events, tough luck. Market is not obligated to serve your particular needs. If you thing enough people care, organize it yourself.
I don't even understand how photos are less invasive of privacy. I try not to be too weird about it, but overall I dislike getting photos taken of me. Why should I put up with that if I want to participate in a hobby?
I'm also old enough to remember not having to worry about this and what irritates me more is - I don't want to be part of someone else's "content".
Sounds about right.
These kids have been on camera since they were in the womb. The delivery had a pro videographer. Parents had baby monitors with a video feed, later a nanny cam. Schools had cameras in the classrooms and busses from before first grade. Higher grades onwards all their peers had smartphones and social media accounts.
Some middle aged dude who doesn't want to be on video makes no sense to them, like that weird uncle of yours who in 2010 had no phone or email address.
Sadly the problem is only going to become bigger with upcoming smart glasses once masses adopt it, everyone will be recording each other without consent.
In the event of litigation (in court or in the public sphere), one would be at a disadvantage if they don’t have video of their side.
Like how you should have a dash cam for your side in a vehicle collision. Although, maybe sufficiently convincing fake videos will make it a moot point in the future.
I think it'll just desensitize people. Long time ago a kiss on a movie theatre screen was enough to make people protest and leave in indignation. Now everybody is few taps away from hardcore porn all the time and not many people care.
Yeah, I feel like the new generation are recorded and published to the world literally on their first breath, right up until their funeral.
We had this idea that privacy violation is like pollution. But now it's like how our generation is used to plastic in the ocean and never seeing all the stars. It's just life.
I think there is an age range where all this "posting" has been normalized, but outside of that generation it's not appreciated. I'm old enough that this kind of shit is still taboo to me, and I know my young kid and her friends are all deeply aware of who's being photographed, and what to share online and what not to. All the kids seem to deliberately distinguish between photo/video of objects and of people around them, when they go to post things. They're definitely aware and careful. It's this middle age range of maybe 25-45 year olds (?) where a sizable number of people are just careless or even accept casual posting of other people's photos and video.
I don't think its so much an age thing. Plenty in the younger generations are more careful what they put online than older people, because they have grown up/are growing up in an environment where it's a thing actually happening and they see the problems, and "I (believe I) can legally do this, so I will do it and don't care what you think" is a common attitude in older generations too, combined with lack of belief in the harms.
I think the generational fracture may cut the other way. My impression, consistent with the polls, is that the younger generations are much more willing to embrace authoritarianism when it advances their personal values and interests. They think that the threat of violence from the state to prevent others from forming an opinion of them based on information they don't control is perfectly acceptable. Laissez-faire is passé.
I'm a youtuber to support my programming project, and I see many people in my situation being a lot more shy about doing that. It's a lot of work to do it properly and takes dedicated attention to not have your parasocial community turn sour or vicious on you: it's no joke.
I wonder how much of this is people expecting that ANY media presence will throw them into the troubles people experience when they have all the media presence. I know if I blow up big enough (not much of a threat right now) that someone will come to hurt me, no matter how I am. That's not about me, it's about statistics. If I blew up that big I could probably afford security…
I think some people assume you'll be confronted with that sort of problem right away just by appearing on youtube etc. Sure you will… eventually. Or if you're staggeringly unlucky.
From a professional perspective, I never worried much and I'm pretty sure it helped me. But I totally understand if there were/are people who are very concerned about putting themselves "out there" when there is at least a remote possibility of some offhand remark or paragraph costing them their job.
> There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
And there's such a focus on the law and expectation of privacy in public places in these comments. There's a huge difference between someone complaining about being recorded in a small hobby community and complaining about being filmed on a public street.
My theory is that those "you just have to accept it" people are unwilling or unable to confront their own wrongdoing. Out of principle, and also triggered by the recent "AI uses all data available" situation I've tried to voice my disagreement when someone was talking a foto of me. The reactions were all around the same: Nobody was willing to just say "Sorry, of course thats your choice". everyone had some lame excuse or was trying to pressure me socially. "But my brother is deaf and just wanted to show it to his friends". As if I care if someone has a disability or not, especially since I am blind myself.
To sum it up, in my experience, people are just not willing to respect your boundaries if you make them aware they overstepped yours. They will always go for some excuse, instead of just accepting they erred.
I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on? Who's to say how much of you I have in the shot? Do you feature? Did you flash by? Are you blurred? Recognisable?
I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.
I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).
Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.
Basic human decency.
Just as the author says: “Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me.”
It doesn’t fall to the legal level, but a social rules level.
People who obnoxiously recording people in public, even if 100% legal, and disregard the wishes and conform of others around them deserve social consequences.
Some things should only exist at the social norms level. IMO it would be hunky dory if societies considered what “privacy in public” looks like in the modern age, and came to the conclusions like “no dragnets pls”.
>Basic human decency.
You've got a very large, diverse population without a strong social identity and ever-fraying trust. So you won't consistently get basic human decency any longer. That's something which is extended to the in-group with which you have real social ties and obligations. Most people don't have this any longer.
> Basic human decency.
While I think we all agree that this is crucially important, for many of us the affront to decency is not the capture of photons that have previously bounced off someone's skin, but the very idea that that person has a claim to those photons in perpetuity.
I think it's indecent to suggest that someone needs to avert their gaze (or in this case, their CMOS sensor) because I happen to be in the area.
>Basic human decency.
If this existed we'd have a lot less problems in this world.
I have no problem with that, but there are a lot of commenters here arguing that it should be enforced at a legal level, rather than a social rules level.
For a forum that tends to trend libertarian, I'm genuinely surprised by the level of enthusiasm for using the government to police the photos people take and share of people in public spaces.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.
I can understand some people preferring not to be filmed in public or shared commercial spaces, but ultimately if you are truly in public then being photographed or recorded is just part of the deal.
I don’t think some people have thought about the second-order effects of things like requiring model release forms for everyone who enters the frame. Imagine getting a ticket or being sued by your busybody neighbor because you took a video of your kids in the backyard and they walked past. Laws like this are frequently abused by people who want to wield power over others, not simply people who simply want to protect themselves.
When you extend the thinking to topics like news reporting and journalism it becomes obvious why you don't want laws requiring everyone to give consent to have video shared of themselves in public: No politician would ever allow footage of themselves to be shared unless it's picture perfect and in line with what they want you to see.
>I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic. 5-10 years ago it was a hot topic in online tech spaces (HN, Reddit, Slashdot and adjacent sites) about preserving your rights to take photos and videos in public spaces.
I don't know about that. Aroudn this time was the peak of "Glassholes" for those who remember that phenomenon. People really didn't want someone to be potentially, passively recording their conversation. Would that not be a thing should Google re-launch Google Glass today? That might be a real factor given how Meta is trying to push AR glasses.
I don't think the author was arguing at all that these things should be illegal, more just that there should be more consideration of other people's preferences where possible.
It's also legal to play an annoying song on repeat all day on a quiet hiking trail, but people (rightfully) recognize that as improper socially.
Here’s an article from 20 years ago on the subject, to support your memory:
=> https://web.archive.org/web/20040611150802/http://villagevoi...
There are at least 3 completely distinct actions at stake here, and we should not pretend they are the same:
1. Taking pictures/videos for personal use.
2. Taking pictures/videos for internet fame/money.
3. Taking pictures/videos as a check on abuse of power.
Most opposition now is due to #2, sometimes under the guise of #3; #3 also has divisions between "is it {illegal,unethical,immoral,weird}?"
But, OP was not in a public space.
> I find it interesting how the winds have changed on this topic.
My very very strong gut feeling is that this is an influx of bots muddying the waters of discussion in concert with the unleashing of the secret police force that is ICE.
It seems to me that every real person sees the crucial importance of public photography in peacefully maintaining accountability.
Part of the issue is, big portion of the footage being recorded, is not worth recording, let alone publishing. (Except for personal value of the person recording, but that doesn't require public sharing)
With the OP example, people getting recorded are not bystanders catching stray camera focus, they are the subject of the video. Without other participants, there would be little 'content'. Imagine going to an indoor climbing venue, recording someone else, and publishing just that.
Not to mention "auditors", whose goal is to use the ambiguous nature of feels-like-a-privacy-invasion-but-legally-isnt when you stick a camera in someone's face in a public place to try and get a rise out of people and prance around as victim.
I think this is a case where the reasonable person test is excellent. Is this use of a camera reasonable for personal/professional purposes
You should be expected to take reasonable steps not to victimise someone by use of a video camera, subject to public interest. That means filming strangers with intent to provoke them should be a crime but raging car park lady cannot reasonably claim to have been victimised. Consent affects what is reasonable without creating a duty-bound obligation not to film without consent.
We already have "reasonable expectations of privacy", why not flip that?
“How To With John Wilson” is an entire genre of precisely this.
The author suggests this was not a public space. Legal or not, it's more about not being a jerk. I think this is especially important in the context of a hobby, and the local community around that hobby. There are easy ways for everyone to get what they want in these situations.
So, why not get a release? Why not perform some light video editing to cut/blur out people who don't want to be there? These are not high bars to clear. I've done similar things, you have every opportunity to talk to the group and sort this out, and explain why you're filming and where you're publishing. Then people can come to an informed decision...
I think the context of the original article is important: at an airsoft range, you’re on private property. You’ve signed a waiver to be there, there’s already rules to follow. Having formal rules for filming would be a totally reasonable and practical thing to do.
Just like some gyms are accommodating to people filming TikTok’s and some aren’t, an airsoft range could have camera or no camera days, if that was something their players wanted.
This. People should either be banned from filming at the private site, or be required to agree to some form of consent seeking.
It's always a possibility that the owners of the range have already considered this and found there is virtually no market for no-camera days. Excluding your most enthusiastic members to include a miniscule number of camera-shy weirdos is unlikely to pay off.
The venues for these things are private and so they can set their own rules. The author proposes a rule: A simple purple lanyard indicating that you don't wish to be included in the published film.
This doesn't necessarily need to be an article, because the author could have just handled it with each venue individually, but this just gets the conversation going about general sentiment and wider applicability.
My guess is that early on this kind of youtuber was relatively rare and so being captured occasionally wasn't a big deal, but that now the trend is catching on, a it's happening regularly and becoming a concern for some people.
The author is a tech lawyer. I think the article is there to start discussion. I agree with him that if private venues allow people to record like this they should offer, at the very least, an opt out. "Purple lanyard" seems like a good way. It's also a pretty easy spot in post production where you can either blur or cut as appropriate.
Aren’t these venues small businesses that very much appreciate whatever publicity someone sharing their venue on social media gives them?
I guess they can weigh that against their customers desire for privacy.
Yes? I'm not sure I understand here.
If you are doing it because you're a creator on YouTube and you are getting paid through views on YouTube, aren't you then required to get release info? If it's for personal use, sure thing, but when you are making money on it then you should absolutely get releases and default to bluring non-released individuals.
I think the bigger issue is that our laws (in the US at least) haven't really caught up with this gig/creator economy. It would be no different than a blockbuster film group filming a war/battle sequence and having to get permission ahead of time from the location and individuals.
My work will have signs up or ask explicitly if they are filming and intend to publish. If you go to a private org with the intention of filming, you should follow the same rules for a full-budget production group.
> If you are doing it because you're a creator on YouTube and you are getting paid through views on YouTube, aren't you then required to get release info?
The model release laws are usually tied to commercial use where some endorsement is implied.
That’s why your company must secure a model release when filming in your office: The material is being used in a manner related to the company and as an employee in the video you are implicitly part of that.
If the AirSoft facility was filming customers and using that footage in an ad, they would probably require model release forms.
There are freedom of speech protections covering the capture of likeness for artistic display, editorial use, and so on.
If the YouTuber made some video in this case as an ad for some AirSoft product and included other people in it without model release forms in a way that implied they were part of the endorsement, they could be in trouble. If they’re just making videos reporting on their games then I doubt there’s an argument that you could make requiring a model release, even if the channel was monetized.
This is also why news channels don't need to secure model release forms when reporting on public events. If we required everyone to do the model release form thing to show any video of them, you would never see any negative videos of politicians or criminals agin.
OP offers a reasonable idea of wearing a lanyard or badge to indicate you'd like to be censored out of the final video. that's practical and provides community enforcement -- for example if someone publishes a video with a subject like that, the community can shame them for it.
Shouldn't it be opt in, not opt out? Wear a badge if you are okay being in it. People who aren't wearing it are blurred out or otherwise removed.
Blur the people who didn’t give consent. The problem is cultural, not technical. Even YouTube has the native ability to blur out faces at the click of a button.
Obviously isn't going to work for OP case. He's playing airsoft. No faces are visible.
The alternative is for the venue to have "recording time" and "non recording time." If you go during non recording time, you're not allowed to bring cameras into the space. And if you don't want to be recorded, you go then. And if you want to record, go during recording time.
Think of it like a public pool. It is unreasonable to say that there should be public pools that children aren't allowed into, but it's also unreasonable to expect all adults to want to swim with children. This is why we have the concept of adult swim time.
Here in Spain if you don't get explicit consent you can get sued for publishing the video (it's fine if you only showed it to the shop owner and didn't publish it), but if someone tells you explicitly they don't want to be recorded you have to stop and delete the video (I assume if you refuse they can just call the police, but I've never seen it happen).
Well, the first step is not being sued and taken to court, but receiving a cease-and-desist letter. But for that to happen, the person that has been videoed needs to be aware of that his face is on YouTube, which in most cases you won't even notice unless it's a video with a very high click count.
> I get it, but the alternative is what?
Stop taking video in public, or at least of the public. You just assume you should be able to do that and the whole world should adjust to your preference. Maybe it should be the other way around.
Do you also support a blanket ban of CCTV in public spaces? I am pretty sure that the bank had a camera in the ATM recording a public pavement 24/7 and nobody bats an eye.
> I get it, but the alternative is what?
Airsoft sites ban/allow videos in certain matches.
Not rocket science. We manage in public spaces like toilets ok.
They also point to purple lanyards in conferences and suggest an equivalent in Airsoft.
Why is this comment going back to zero? Does Hacker News not have the ability to move forward? Is this a central tenant to the nihilism worship that is Hacker News?
You can use AI to blur anyone that doesn't give permission. You can't use the excuse of "it's too much work!" It should be the law that you can't indiscriminately video everyone for your own financial gain.
Blur is boring, but swapping faces or other recognizable features to something similar but AI-generated sounds cool.
I get it, but the alternative is what?
Don't publish the videos unless you have a good reason to. There is no upside to just throwing everything you record on the internet. People don't watch the videos, your channel is degraded by having tons of garbage on it, and people in the videos don't want to be online like that.
If you stop pretending that a random video is somehow going to 'go viral' or make you famous, the entire problem just evaporates.
If you want to publish videos put the effort into making good ones that people will actually watch, which means raising the bar by (in part) finding people who want to be in them. Videos of random people doing pretty mundane things like their hobbies won't turn you into the next YouTube star.
> Do you feature?
Yes, this is what the author is concerned about. There’s a big difference between being filmed incidentally, and being filmed on purpose for the activity you’re engaged in. Being accidentally in the background is one thing, while being the subject of a video and having the camera aimed at you is another. Even though public photography is also legal where I live, and I believe we should keep that right, if I filmed close-ups of people in the car park getting in and out of their cars, I’d expect most people would object and find it uncomfortable.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
i think i would prefer this. i'd rather live in the world where no one can record or photograph you in public than the world where you're streamed or entombed in a vod for life.
Shooting video for yourself is one thing, sharing it to a third party like Google, MS, or Apple is another. Unfortunately many people have been brainwashed to not consider or even understand the difference.
I'm fine with being recorded as long as you keep it private. Not with that video ending up on your Drive backups or OneDrive etc, let alone YT.
This is drawing a very different line from the majority of conversations in this thread, I imagine.
"Sharing with a third party" because you have phone backups enabled is very different from streaming live or uploading to social media, like most are actually discussing here.
As an American living in Europe, I have seen Europe do "no cameras by default" quite successfully.
No private cameras (maybe)
Are dash cams / bicycle cams not ubiquitous in Europe by now?
I would have thought they would be very useful for adjudicating high cost events such as automobile collisions, or even police interactions.
I think there is at least something of a middle ground for almost-but-not-quite-public spaces and events. In this case the author is talking about airsoft games; it seems totally reasonable for the venue or organizer to enact policies, whether "no cameras allowed" or "purple helmet means don't show / blur this person".
In fully public spaces I think we're pretty much out of luck, though I do think that laser/lidar-based countermeasures should be legal.
> I get it, but the alternative is what?
If AI photo/video generation continues to improve then it shouldn't be a problem as the photo/video taking culture will most likely die off once people assume any photos/videos they see are generated.
> Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
> We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
Heh. As a photog I've have plenty of similar run ins with people...but only when wielding an SLR (or similar). Was once standing on a sidewalk, saw a building that looked cool, took a picture. I'm more into architecture than people. Security comes out from the lobby to accost me. I very politely told them "Dude, I'm on the sidewalk, you can't do shit"
I also had the local transit agency threaten to call the cops on me for taking photos. Literally of just the platform and rails (without people) when I was trying to document the system for Wikipedia. Even though on their website it EXPLICITLY states that what I was doing was within their rules. Ignoring the fact that it was totally legal regardless.
That time I just (metaphorically) ran away rather than dealing with a belligerent station agent. Was what I was doing wrong? No. Was it legal? Yes. But did I want to deal with the transit police? Nope.
The thing that drives me batshit nuts is no one seems to care if you're taking a picture with a phone. The latest iPhone have megapixel counts in excess of many DSLR and mirrorless cameras. I can be way more sneaky with my phone. By using a DSLR type camera I'm being very public that "Hey, I'm taking a picture here" that should assure people, rather than scare them.
> I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
This seems reasonable to me. If its airsoft, how many people are involved? 10? 20? Just go around and ask people if they will allow you to post video of the game with them in it.
The the author of the article wasn't in a public area, but in a private area at a private event, perhaps model release forms are a really good idea for participants.
Well the majority of the facilities are private land, right, not public, right? Organize formal sessions during which photography is prohibited. If you don't get any takers, the sport might have left you behind.
The alternative is not uploading video of people doing a hobby.
I don't think your situations are the same as someone appearing on some youtube channel without their consent every single week unless they opt out of participating at all.
If I see someone filming me while driving I usually give them the finger. I suppose that's my consent for them to do whatever with it. I don't foolishly believe they can't do it, but I do suggest maybe they shouldn't.
Filming and publishing is different things though legally.
E.g. you can film public spaces as much as you want, but be careful of what you post to YouTube.
What if there was some sort of middle layer escrow holdings platform for users to sign up to that has your identity, facial biometrics, and crypto wallet. The user can also specify how they want their likeness used, or if they do not want to appear, etc.
Any user uploading to a video platform has to run their video through this integration user-facial detection layer at some point in their editing pipeline. Payments are made accordingly.
Just brainstorming.
>I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
Not every thing has to be recorded.
It is like all those runners and cyclists who log and share all their runs/rides on Strava without even taking the time to figure out if it really serves a purpose other than a vain attention seeking.
This reminds me of that time secret US military bases were identified from serviceman's social fitness data?
https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...
Honestly, the older I get the more I cherish that I grew up in a time before the compulsion to post literally everything.
> Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
Either that or, if you can’t get a model release, make sure to blur their face in editing. This used to be standard practice.
In Germany it's generally illegal to film people apart from certain exceptions (mostly public events and public spaces). Even when filming something in public, you must be filming the event/space and not a person or group who happens to be occupying it, which is a fine distinction. Even surveillance cameras have strict requirements to be legal. You don't want to be the guy who goes to jail for having a surveillance camera, right?
Tangentially, nightclubs put stickers over your phone cameras and that is a great idea.
Good to know you reside on the other side of the planet. I wouldnt want to meet you in public under any circumstances. So much entitlement and disregard for other people is sickening.
... The bank was filming the ATM the whole time.
There are a lot of '1A' auditors on youtube. They can be nasally and annoying but it's hilarious how often people go into a rage that they're being filmed despite the fact the people getting angry are doing the same to everyone else.
Back in my day shakes first there were places where someone could do things that would normally be mildly embarrassing because they were in a supportive community. In this example, it could be playing pretend and possibly saying goofy things or falling over and tripping or getting your butt handed to you by someone half your age or something.
When I was young, it would have been playing open mics as a teenager. I wasn't amazing but it's really important to play publicly in order to grow as a musician, and that means kinda sucking in public. I would not have become a musician if I didn't have that supportive community.
In this day and age, if I were to do that, someone would probably live stream it or film it on their phone and put it on YouTube, then It would get found by the kind of awful kids that like to make other people feel awful for no reason, then they would have found my like Facebook or social media or something, I'd catch shit at school, and I never would have touched an instrument again.
So yeah, save your highlight reels for someone else, thanks.
It may be an exaggeration but it feels like half the problem with the internet has been this sort of “dunk culture” that’s proliferated in the past 10-15 years. How heinous is it that anybody can gain significant notoriety by just providing a steady supply of innocent people to lambast?
It's definitely not an exaggeration. YouTubers talk about this all the time. The videos that do the best are the ones that are negative.
One day somebody is going to run for President who had an extensively online youth and it's going to be wild.
Well J D Vance has all those awkward pics of him as a young fellow and it hasn't hurt him. He made VP coming from nowhere.
I would also push back against the whole "this is just being perceived in public" thing, because you're not consenting to being perceived by the entire planet, you were consenting to being perceived by the people present and in the community. Like if there's a bully in the community, the community can do something about it or you can at least avoid them. Like you are consenting to interacting with a culture of like-minded people, and you know they're like-minded because they all showed up to the same event to do the same thing. That is not true of the open internet.
I feel this has some parallels to concerns over house/porch cameras which are proliferating these days.
I have no problem with the idea that everyone on the street is recording from their porch... as long as it's for their own siloed use, and it takes a conscious act for them to share it. If someone wants to stalk you, they'd need conscious assistance from your neighbors. If the police are tracking a hit-and-run, they need to ask people for footage during a time period, etc.
But the moment someone says "hey let's network all those with object/face recognition so that you can easily trace every person walking down the street", then we've got a problem.
I agree that we need a renewed social agreement on "no perception of privacy in public" concept now that cameras are everywhere, are smaller than a pinhead, and cost pennies .
Laws aren't sacred, they are just the rule over the living by the dead. All of our privacy laws were made when the technology , culture and demographics were completely different.
It is funny how insular and US centric many of the comments here are. In fact many countries do have legislation requiring consent in many scenarios for photographing or publishing photos. And it turns out that it is not actually very problematic.
Wikimedia has some examples, but I'm sure it is not comprehensive: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Country_specific_...
I don't think the law is the issue here. Stuff like #metoo shows how devasating effects can be even if you eventually sue and win. And the audience sentiment never really changes because they never come back to the story.
Mix that with the lack of general shame for this stuff and you have this weird state of affairs where you don't want to do anything slightly risky. Nothing silly, nothing that can cause you to be looked over on job apps, nothing that you enjoy by yourself but others find "weird".
Because the US has other laws that make the kind of laws you're talking about very difficult. You have to look at the laws together as a part of a system and not a one off set of actions.
In addition laws in the US tend to protect the rich very well and get wholesale ignored for the poor. That is Jeffrey Bezos will punish you with the full extent of the law for taking a video of him beating a baby fur seal to death with a bat, while star-wars kid will be begging for venmo donations in order to get thousands of copies of video taken down while law enforcement ignores the situation.
1. The author of the article is in the UK
2. Recording people without their consent still happens in lot of other countries other than the US. I bet I'm in tons of YouTube videos showing skiing in the Alps.
I mean there is a "photo release" or "Model Release" contract used often when taking pictures in any private place that grants the right for the photographer to use those photos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_release
Not really, other European countries also have the "don't participate if you don't want to be filmed" mentality.
E.g. author says:
> But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conference
I've been to many such conferences, and they all make it very clear that all the photos can be taken and used in advertising by anyone, both in agreements as well as entrance banners. Same as in US.
Some conferences I've attended provide stickers to put on your badge and if you don't want to be photographed/published the conference organizers may pay attention with respect to their publicity photos. Of course, others snapping pics with their cell phones may not. (And, in Germany as well as other countries, I've never seen explicit warnings about not publishing photos of people at a conference without permission.).
Most people are pretty reasonable and aren't aggressive with their picture taking. But there are almost certainly photos of you online whatever the local country laws may say.
In my country is like this, or was, I have not worked in that space for a long time.
An individual can record you on the street without problems.
A crew can't record you on the street for anything that will be aired on tv/cinema without your signing that you give your permision.
A Youtuber can record you on the street without problems.
Well, the author in the article is in the US, posting about behavior they experience in the US, so it really isn't that surprising.
ah, .co.uk, the TLD long favored by lawyers blogging in the US, indeed.
I agree a lot with the sentiments here and I think people who want to avoid being filmed should have that right. But, as someone who doesn't mind (and is younger) I suppose I could share my rationalizion for it (as flawed as it may be)
One often mentioned reason is the fear that in some way your likeness will end up in something significant, or viral. That makes sense, it's the most invasive and significant violation. We "risk becoming the side character in someone else's parasocial relationship" as another commentator mentioned. I myself wouldn't want that either, but I derive some comfort from one main observation: virality doesn't scale. A lot of the worries come from the fact that "everyone is filming now", "everything is shared now". That's true, but the likelihood of any of this ever becoming popular or even seen goes down as the volume goes up. That alone is enough for me to not be that worried, at least not by the increased prevalence of public filming/photography.
On the other hand, this does nothing to limit the effect of data harvesting and government espionage, a real worry I might have.
It's interesting that you mentioned being younger. One thing I've noticed is that as people accumulate different experiences and social groups (not necessarily just because of age), they often develop different "personas" depending on the environment. In one setting, you might be an enthusiast sharing a video about a hobby, while in another you might be a CEO interacting with your team, shareholders, partners, or customers where you naturally behave differently. The challenge is managing these "many worlds" without them colliding. One solution that's becoming more feasible now is the ability to modify your appearance and voice depending on the context.
The thing that I find more frustrating than anything is photos of children. I'm not so bothered about myself.
I have a young child - he's two and a half. Most people are considerate and ask if it's OK to take a photo - and I generally say yes if it's friends - but we were at a wedding recently and a staff member, total stranger, at the venue was laughing at him running around and asked if they could take a picture, and then got stroppy when I said no. I just think it's quite strange behaviour to want to take photos of a child you don't know. It's quite different to the professional photographer taking photos for the hosts in my mind, which you basically accept by bringing your kids to an event like that.
A mum at a playgroup just took out phone and started filming my son playing with her child. My wife asked her to stop and she again got quite stroppy, even though the group explicitly said that photos should only be taken with consent in that space!
I can tell you're really fun at parties /s
Does stroppy mean angry where you're from? Where's that?
I’m from the UK
It does yes but more like in a bad mood. A teenager who is rolling their eyes and making a comment because they’ve been asked not to do something could be described as having a strop.
It's really interesting that the big objection is really about sharing the resultant video (widely).
I actually feel the same, I don't really mind if I'm at the gym and in the back of a video someone's taking of themselves to review later to take notes on their form. I actually do kind of care if it gets posted to YouTube and now 100,000 people have seen me covered in sweat or struggling with something or whatever. It's something that's technically 'illegal' in a private space here in the UK, so why do we all just accept/allow it anyway? YouTube or Instagram could easily work out if the video was taken indoors and show a 'are you sure' message.
Just a thought. It's not that big a deal, of course, though to some people it might be (for good reasons).
I think I'm sympathetic to both sides of this.
If my kid is on some fun Disney ride, and I take a short video of them, and also there are some other people in the background or also on the ride, I would still fee comfortable sharing the video. Well, I wouldn't, because I don't put videos of my kids online, but if I was comfortable doing that, I wouldn't feel deterred by the presence of others.
But also, if someone else takes a photo of my kids in public (or at Disney), I would feel somewhat uncomfortable about it, and I'd feel even more uncomfortable about finding that photo online.
I don't know how to square that, ethically. Sometimes I see posts on Reddit that go "hey, I was out at the beach, and I saw this couple proposing, and I got this amazing photo of it, does anyone know them so I can send them a copy," and I think "you just took one of the most important, intimate, private moments of this couple's life and posted it online without their permission," but it doesn't seem to upset anyone because the couple will look really great in the photo. Does that make a difference? I've got no answers for this, just questions.
I think conversation gets more telling if you include some more protected groups like children. And then more slightly more intimate places, like say pools or beaches and expand it to proper zoom and telephoto lenses.
Is there still in those case no expectation of privacy? Where exactly is the line? Maybe changing rooms and toilets are not public places anymore... But is the line really that clear?
I encounter people taking pictures, making video calls, and recording insta/tiktok/whatever videos in the gym changing room all the god damned time. I keep telling people to stop, but not once has anyone responded with "oh sorry". A belligerent "why?" is the most polite response I've received.
Genuinely curious: what concrete negative consequences are there from appearing in the background of other people’s photos/videos, in a full face mask no less?
Is he afraid that someone will be able to identify him as engaging in a hobby that some people might be judgmental about, e.g. a potential employer finding the footage and concluding “this guy spends lots of time and money playing a children’s game; he’s clearly not a serious person.” That I can understand.
But it seems like his position is stronger than this:
>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
So essentially, it’s wrong to publish any photo that happens to include people in the background? If I take an artistic photo at an art museum [0] or a restaurant [1] or a streetscape [2] and there happen to be people in the background, what possible harm could come to the people incidentally captured?
[0] https://500px.com/search?q=the%20Met&type=photos&sort=releva...
[1] https://500px.com/search?q=Busy%20restaurant&type=photos&sor...
[2] https://500px.com/search?q=Times%20Square%20&type=photos&sor...
There are A LOT of concrete reasons you might not want to be recorded at an airsoft event:
* Don't want to be ridiculed if you look silly (it is airsoft, after all)
* It's distracting to be videoed
* You have a stalker trying to find information about you
* Makes you feel pressure to put on make up and look "decent"
* Something you say might sound bad out of context and result in being ostracized or otherwise socially punished
* You might have a secret airsoft tactic or codes you don't want people to know about
* You don't want facial recognition trained on you
* You told someone you couldn't go to their party because you are sick and don't want to get caught lying
* etc etc
These aren't all huge issues, but they are reasonable.
* You called-in sick for work :)
> what concrete negative consequences are there
It isn't necessarily about consequences. I don't want photos of me on the internet. I don't like the idea that other people get to do that without my consent.
I don't have any power to stop it. I am not even sure I should, or what limits it should have. But I don't think I should need to justify that as a preference.
> Genuinely curious: what concrete negative consequences are there from appearing in the background of other people’s photos/videos, in a full face mask no less?
How about if you're overweight, doing airsoft to try to get into shape, and bellyflop into some mud on video?
That's social media crack right there, boys and girls.
Can you understand why someone might not want that kind of thing posted?
Maybe you just don't want the AI that Google is definitely training to predict video frames to insert your face into AI-generated videos?
That would be the fault of Google.
You're looking for a generic reason, I think, and there isn't and doesn't need to be one other than "people can desire their privacy for various reasons"
Maybe publicizing where someone is every week lets criminals plan their crimes. Maybe it gives away someone's location to an abusive ex or family member or stalker. Maybe people just don't want Google and the like to have even more data about our whereabouts and actions and identity.
These are all nice concrete consequences, but I’m not sure having public images meaningfully exacerbates them.
>robbers
Why would a criminal take time to comb through random, anonymous, uncategorized images of people to ambiguously identify someone who might not be home (and might not even have a house worth breaking into), when it’s much easier to just stake out wealthy neighborhoods and definitively see who’s not home and who has unsecured valuables, as has been done for centuries?
>stalkers
So said stalker would have to run facial recognition software on every image on the internet to find the handful that might incidentally contain their victim? Someone that determined would just hire or use the methods of a PI, which have long been effective at finding people who don’t want to be found.
>Google et al.
The solution here is to regulate what Google et al. can do with your data, not regulate what people can post online.
I mean the whole point of privacy is you not knowing... It kind of defeats the point if you need a reason, because the reason is probably...private
>>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
If you don't want someone to make a record of the photons that arrive at a particular place because those photons bounced off you, then don't let them go out into the world far beyond your private space.
Why are you trying to dehumanize the idea of taking a picture of someone and possibly posting it publicly by referring to it as photons? Yes we are all just atoms moving around in 3D space but it doesn't take away the fact that people should be allowed to exist outside their house without some random person recording them and possibly posting it to the internet. You don't care and that is totally fine but some people do.
> There has been no “put on this purple lanyard if you don’t want to be included in the public version of the video” rule, which I’ve seen work pretty well at conferences I have attended (even if it is opt-out rather than consent).
This bothers me. The default should be not including people, and instead offer lanyards (or whatever) who want to be included.
I know why it doesn’t work that way, though.
I had this when I rode with a motorbike group. It was a loose collection of people that rode a specific route on the weekend.
I only went a few times, but it was obvious the people with the cameras were looking for interesting content and drama. I cut an open corner and ended up in the highlight reel as some example of what not to do. Even though everyone there was 50% over the speed limit and riding “dangerously” in the eyes of others, what got put on the video was the interesting stuff. And of course, you never got to see the speedo of the camera man as he went 2-3 times the limit.
Another biker I knew said he didn’t ride with those guys because they’re just out there to bait for content.
We, a group of people living on a street where we get a lot of dangerous motorbikers passing our homes, started collecting these video's recently.
Our goal is to get the roads closed for motorbikes, place bike-repelling infrastructure and to have police involved in the many cases of one-sided accidents. For that we need to convince local governments that motorbikes are misbehaving.
So we now sift through instagram, youtube, etc to find such video's you mention where they ride "our" roads. Or where individuals that we've seen riding our roads misbehave in other places. This is obviously nothing "legal proof", but it's a growing dossier. And also a clear reason why someone may not want to be filmed. In one case, a motorbike lost control, narrowly missed a thick metal bar and plowed through two front yards of neighbors. Police was involved. We managed to find this individual on several other such videos clearly racing way over the speed limit. He lost his drivers licence. Not because of the video's, but they did help make the case this person was structurally misbehaving, not a one-time mistake or technical error.
---
Sidenote, to illustrate this is not a few "get off my lawn" people, but that this is an actual problem: These motorbikers are but a few dozen individuals over the year, yet their noise and the danger and agression towards others road users is out of any proportion. This is a quiet nature reserve where people come to run, stroll, watch birds, go swimming with family, drive grandma around, bicycle, skate, picknick. Where our kids play and where our teens cycle to school. On busy days there can be hundreds of cyclists and pedestrians in a sunny afternoon. The speed limit is mostly 30km/h (18mph), the road is 2.5 to 3m (8-9ft) wide, traffic from both sides. Motorbikers have been seen to hit 130km/h (80mph). Where children are cycling, couples are walking, fitgirls skating and so on.
I sympathise with this, people who are endangering others deserve consequences of the law. I live in a city near a straight road and often hear bikes step through 2-3 gears at night. I know how fast that is and it’s dangerous.
One of the reasons I stopped riding with this group was a few people there didn’t have a strong will to live and so adrenaline and confrontation was what they were looking for.
The specific route I mentioned though is 50km outside of the nearest city, through a wasteland and ridden at times to minimise traffic getting in the way. The best time was 6pm on a Tuesday night where you’d be lucky to pass anyone.
lol why do you want to punish all motorcycle riders instead of the actual people who are misbehaving....
I would like to share an even more extrem version of this.
I come from a country that could be potentially affected by the Russian-Ukranian war.
A couple of years ago, the government presented a program for volunteers, consisting of a military crash-course over a weekend to get to know the basics. Military service is voluntary in my country, so I thought it might actually be a good idea to have had a rifle in my hand at least once. You never know.
So I decided to sign up and got a few documents to sign. One of them was explicit consent for the organizing party to use any pictures taken during the training in order to use it as promotional material. No opt-out possible.
You understand? They could take pictures of me during a voluntary training, and post them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet!
I even sent them an email asking to clarify and if I could opt out. They refused and would not allow me to participate if I didn't accept.
That is a positive example of respecting consent:
They asked for consent before filming.
You disagreed and didn't participate.
They didn't record you and didn't publish video of you.
Maybe off-topic and patronizing .. sorry about that.
"Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun."
I was wondering if there are no biodegradable bullets for Airsoft and found out that they exist. Maybe a better solution than plastic in the woods.
They make PLA ones, advertised as biodegradable, but AFAIK the settings for them to biodegrade never happen in nature, it's ever so slightly better than the alternatives but far from perfect, or even good.
https://www.filamentive.com/the-truth-about-the-biodegradabi...
> PLA is only biodegradable under industrial composting conditions and anaerobic digestion – there is no evidence of PLA being biodegradable in soil, home compost or landfill environment.
PLA is also commonly mixed with mystery additives which likely aren’t biodegradable at all.
Yeah, that's a bit of a sham. I was thinking like compressed paper or something.
I read up on PLA when I got my 3D printer because it's popular material for that. From what I understand, it's biodegradable above 50° C. Not something you'll find outside Death Valley. Still better than most other options, but it would be nice if we had something that was stable for weeks and then degrades nicely.
Most of the brands use PLA. Most of the fields (all the ones I’ve been too) require the use of biodegradable (PLA). PLA is plastic.
Edit: forgot to say. In every field I’ve been too, there’s millions of leftover BBs, and I’ve never seen one with signs of degradation.
Not patronising, this was exactly my first (and off-topic) thought as well.
We have lived in our house for +15 years and we still regularly find small fluorescent yellow ball bearings in the garden soil from the previous owners family. These things are here to stay
I haven’t played with airsoft since I was a kid, but I remember the biodegradable ones back then had issues. They would fall apart when you shot em, sometimes deteriorate inside the gun and muck it up.
I’m sure they’re better now, but I have no idea!
Most of them usually are.
I wonder what would happen if someone wore a T-shirt with an ITAR restricted weapons blueprint on it or something. Hypothetically it would be legal to display that in public in the US, but illegal to post it publicly facing for foreigners to access on the internet.
Even if it were a gray area, the serious penalties would probably be enough to make someone want to blur it out.
> Hypothetically it would be legal to display that in public in the US
Would it? I'm certainly not a lawyer or ITAR expert, but I would think that if you walked through a public space where you couldn't positively confirm that everyone present (and everyone who might view it transitively via video recordings, live streams, etc.) was OK to access the materiel on the shirt, that would be considered an export and you'd be in big trouble.
I'm no ITAR expert either, but IDK how wearing a T-shirt could possibly be an export. My lay understanding of export is that the information would somehow have to leave the country; if someone looks at the T-shirt and transmits it out the country they'd be the exporter, not the person wearing the T-shirt. If someone records the t-shirt and transmits it, they'd be the exporter.
ITAR was circumvented for PGP by publishing a book of the source code and exporting that. I fail to see how publishing a video would be different.
My understanding following Cody Wilson's lawsuit to publish gun plans online, which is a more recent case, did not follow that. He ended up having to follow ITAR export compliance, although he was allowed unlimited distribution to US nationals and granted an ITAR license that might let him export under the conditions of that license.
Nowadays you'll find most gun plans end up on odyssee or surreptitiously on github or something like that. If you go to high-profile 3d gun websites they will almost always point you to a decentralized server that the government can't go after.It seems maybe they might allow you to export it, but you'd have to get a license first, even if they were required to issue it to you could take years of lawsuits that a youtuber probably will not pursue?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Distributed_v._United_...
I’m not sure if anyone has missed the delicious irony that airsoft is one of the rare sports where faces and thus identity is covered , pretty much the whole time. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a human face or anything identifiable in ANY airsoft video I’ve ever seen.
So while the author makes an interesting point about surveillance I can’t tell if he’s being ironic on purpose.
This isn't a general solution, but since it's Airsoft can't you just wear a helmet that covers your whole head?
^ you should be wearing a mouthguard and goggles anyway, add a skate helmet and your head is probably not visible
I always wondered: who is picking up all that plastic waste afterwards? Never been myself, but I was told 1000s of shots being fired during one session is not an exceptional case. The author talks about "Running around in the woods" so I'm a bit concerned that this may cause undesirable amounts of environmental pollution.
I would bet that dumping a 747's worth of plastic BBs in remote UK woodland is probably not as bad as everyone driving their petrol-powered cars there.
It's being done on private property, so presumably the property owner is okay with that damage?
That plastic is still going to be there thousands of years after the property passes out of the current owner’s hands.
Yeah unfortunately those BBs are going to stay there basically forever. Biodegradable means it'll degrade in like, hella hot temperatures that you'll never get unless there's a forest fire.
Plus side I don't think they degrade into microplastics? And aerate your soil! :D
Though water bottles is probably orders of magnitude more harmful to the planet.
Biodegradable airlift BB's are unfortunately an exception in the sport.
The answer seems pretty simple.
Ask your teammates not to take videos, or find a different group or a different hobby. But since they genuinely enjoy posting the videos, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're probably the one who's going to have move on.
You're entitled to not want videos of you taken in public places showing up online. But you're not entitled to getting that outcome.
I expect an airsoft venue is actually a private space, not a public one. Airsoft but-actually-in-public would have people concerned about a terrorist attack, not being recorded for insta.
To that extent, the hobbyists who like to create content for the internet should be asking for consent since their footage, and arguably their clout, depends on the participation of everybody else in the group. Otherwise they're just traipsing around a private plot of land all kitted up but with nobody to shoot. If they're monetising that content then they are profiting from the OP's likeness.
This is not far removed from the (fully understandable) blowback on influencers recording themselves (and often other people for rage-induced clout) inside gyms. These are also not public places.
If it's private then it's up to the owner.
And they may very well have decided that more customers want to take and share videos, than there are customers who are bothered by it.
And nobody is talking about monetizing content here. There's no profit. If there were, that would be a different conversation obviously. But the post did not bring that up.
And also, some people could suffer real damages. Imagine if someone is lying to their wife about what they do on the weekend or about who they've gone to a conference with. Or imagine if someone has found themselves with dangerous enemies who discover where they go, what they do and with whom.
At the moment, these things are not the problem of the person taking the video
> Airsoft but-actually-in-public would have people concerned about a terrorist attack, not being recorded for insta.
I live in Taiwan. My friend and I were drinking beers by the river one night and decided to go on a late night bike ride, maybe 1am. We grabbed citybikes and tooled along the river, which in Taipei in many places is a nice bit of pavement next to massive mangroves and then the river itself. We were coming up on a brushy bit when a squad of completely kitted out soldiers came out of the bush with massive rifles, night vision goggles, full camo, geared to the nines. My buddy and I both nearly fell off our bikes and were immediately thinking the same thing: Oh fuck the PLA is here. Common knowledge is they'd come up that exact river and make straight for the presidential palace if they were gonna do their thing.
Turns out it was just very enthusiastic airsoft players. Apparently you can just play it wherever in Taipei, there's not really rules about it? So people play in the riversides at night.
Their kit was ridiculous. One guy had tracer pellets. They let us wear their night vision goggles and shoot trees. Great time.
They could also blur the requester's face for the second or two it's likely in frame in the process they're very likely already editing the video before posting
There's also the option of having a detailed image of a penis on your clothing so that any sort of social media app will R-rate a video featuring you.
I wonder if this works if you use pictures of Disney characters instead (to generate copyright strikes, or mandatory relicensing fees).
If the two tactics don’t work separately, would they work when combined?
Disney characters work too, from what I hear.
If the problem starts to become big enough, I'd expect airsoft venues to offer special streaming or non-streaming times, depending on which group is bigger. Similar to how Saunas offer special clothed or women-only days.
We should be entitled to that.
You can also ask for your face to be blurred.
Think bigger - public spaces, streets, in general. Would be nice to solve this.
It’s solved. You can take pictures in public in the US. That’s part of our fundamental freedoms.
It is solved. Videos and photos are allowed in public spaces. You just don’t like the solution.
I disagree. It wouldn't be nice to solve it, because it would mean nobody could ever take a picture of anything where there might be anyone recognizable in the background, without getting them to sign some kind of model release first.
Is that what you want? For innocent photography in public to be essentially outlawed?
The one time I was accidentally captured on video, I was filtered out, but I actually wish I was there.
Many years ago, I went to a Green Day concert where they played 21st Century breakdown for the first time. There was a large video camera on a crane above the floor. About a year later, I visited a friend and we played Green Day's (then) new Rockband game.
I noticed that Tre's dance around his drums looked awfully familiar, and then at the end of one song, the camera focused on a statue next to the stage, that I was staring at before the show. My friend didn't believe me when I told him I was in the concert they recorded to make the game.
Unfortunately, all the people in the crowd were removed and replaced with faceless stick-figure-like people. I really wish my face was in there, because it would have proved that I was there, and give me something to look for when someone else is playing the game.
I do a lot of photography, including "street" photography, but I don't shoot photos of people. I believe that you should be asked for your consent to be photographed, and I tend to avoid social interaction whenever possible. I empathize with the author here. I would probably say "yes" in that situation, but I would also expect to be asked.
I also do occasional street photography. I'm opposite of your view. I don't ask for consent and take photos (even candids). People rarely have problems. If they have, they'll come and ask me not to include them in the frame.
I'm not nearly as strict: I just prefer that pictures of my kids not be uploaded to social media (or cloud photo hosting services, etc.)
Regardless of that, some strangers think it's fine to take pictures of them in public... sometimes they ask first, sometimes they don't.
In Netherland schools have to ask for permission to use photos of your children on social media or elsewhere. I have no idea if the same holds true for non-schools.
I think this is something you need to address with the owner or organizer of the event. If they say you can film, you can. If they say you can't, you can't. I imagine there might be sufficient demand for airsoft fights where video is not allowed.
And there might be events to find that explicitly state no filming.
Great points. With Meta glasses and other similar gadgets I think manual consent is not enough. There should be a 'protocol' to announce that you don't allow your images to be included in social media. I propose a QR code that would signify that you don't want to filmed. We need to push for legislation allowing (returning) such liberty. After such automated consent is legal it will be up to social media platforms to blur and anonymize individuals with such preferences. Finally we will have a job where AI could be put to good use!
The best answer is becoming comfortable with the part of yourself that enjoys your hobbies. Embrace it, let go of the anxiety. Strangers have thoughts like oceans have waves.
As someone who plays a lot of online games, there is a similar problem with streamers. While I don’t say anything I wouldn’t want to be recorded because that’s probably a good idea anyway, it is certainly possible I could end up in some kind a fail compilation or otherwise.
But I don’t really care, for one because the stakes are lower when it’s fully online behind a mostly anonymous account, but also because I am confident if anyone was actually watching a streamer in my game I would find out about it.
If the YouTuber at your local field was raking in views, you would probably know about it, and could you try to resolve it with them. Otherwise these videos are probably not being seen by anyone but their recorder.
I don’t know about the UK, but in the USA the idea of “if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces” is pretty regularly upheld in courts. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in a public space.
You might have some recourse if another person’s video singles you out, but just being one of the several people in an airsoft video, where your face is partially obscured anyway, isn’t much of a legal standing.
Yea, and in this case unless the property owner says no filming said person would have no legs to stand on.
In most 'fun' events like this with random members of the public said venue has a monetary interest in ensuring people can film in the vast majority of the cases. People go there to have fun, and sharing videos of said fun is but one more way to ensure they get future customers.
> You don’t have an expectation of privacy in a public space.
Pretty similar in the UK.
> I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly, I’d be hopeful that they would at least consider my request. I have not done this.
I've done this several times in various contexts. If you ask in a nice way, it usually works
If you don't ask, it's very unlikely people will have the telepathy needed to understand what you quietly want
For air-soft specifically it is also very feasible to wear a full face mask and become very hard for regular people to recognise.
If this was beach volleyball I would be more inclined to agree with the poster, but surely everyone is wearing face masks playing Airsoft?
As an avid beach volleyball player, every tournament and most league games have one or more people recording them with cell phones or go pros on tripods at the end line. Just part of the game.
Nobody bats an eye, I assume because we're already out in public, basically in bathing suits.
In Germany, they have to ask him for his permission. If he insists, the video has to get deleted. If they publish the video without his consent, he can sue them and – aside of deleting the video – they may face penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment, though both are improbable in that context.
https://www.prigge-recht.de/filmen-im-oeffentlichen-raum-was...
Every picture of you posted publicly will eventually be linked to you. Probably by Palantir.
There's face recognition. There's gait recognition. There's inference of the likely participants from cell phone data and known movement patterns. Some of this is probabilistic but still useful. Even if the matching wasn't done at the time, it can be done later.
Last year I was at a concert hanging outside enjoying a J and my beer. Suddenly there were four young women shoving a phone in my face asking me questions. I was a deer in the headlights. Turns out they were live streaming and just talking to random people. It made me quite uncomfortable - who's on the other end looking at me? They were later live streaming from the pit...
Of course Ive had video cameras in my face before at concerts but they weren't streaming and the results were probably seen by very few people. Now its instant broadcast to whoever is on the other end.
I feel it spans way wider than just hobbies. For example, when people film in gyms, which is a private place. Or everywhere you go, there is a good chance you will be in someone's vlog/photo/youtube video.
> Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people
sounds like an environmental nightmare
I have the same issue with board gamers. Now, admittedly it isn't as intrusive as audio/video uploads. But so many want to record the game along with the names of the players. When I request they don't use my actual name and just put Player A (or whatever) they look at me like I'm a weirdo. When did it become weird to want as little information about yourself to be online?
A counterbalance is that there's such a colossal volume of new YouTube 'content' published every day that approximately no one will end up watching an obscure video with your cameo anyway.
I guess the concern then shifts to dragnet automated surveillance of it.
So sue. Don't expect legislators or online legions to protect you. Sue to protect others in the same situation.
The common-law tort of invasion of privacy grows to encompass new situations only through court cases.
Courts (i.e., judges) are not looking to create rules out of thin air, but look to reflect when expectations have changed in a way that tracks the principles behind the tort.
In this case, an initial historical period of permitting publication by default can be followed by a restrictive period of prohibiting invasions, based on the recognizing dangers from publication, e.g., permanent and lasting damage to one's business relationships through disclosing of embarrassing but irrelevant images.
To make law you have to get out of the realm of personal feelings and start expressing principles for the way people should live together.
We Brits don't speak up enough in general. An e.g. German would have no qualms about going up to the person filming and making their concerns known. That's exactly why it's become normalised
Also many people just flip out even about the most reasonable of requests.
>We Brits don't speak up enough in general.
They would be wrong to, given that it's legal to take photographs or videos in a public place.
There is no expectation of privacy in a public place in the UK.
The law is not a moral compass
How do you rationalise being pro-photography in public but anti free speech?
Airsoft fields are generally private property.
If someone went up to me and "made their concerns known", I think I'd likely just walk away. It's the best way to defuse the situation.
So point blank refusal to listen to someone's concerns? Very on brand for the society we live in today. As long as something is legal, it's fine right.
Also not sure why you assumed there was any situation to be "defused". Weird. I guess you may be the type I referred to in my last paragraph
Posting videos on YouTube is commercial use. Even if you earn no money, the intent is almost always to “grow the channel” to the point where you can monetize it, sponsorships, brand deals, etc.
Commercial use in most jurisdictions is handled differently from the “free speech” exception. There are generous carve outs for art though. Which is interesting. If I sell a photograph it’s art but if I sell it to an ad agency for use on a billboard it’s commerce?
But the world we live in is so changed, it is a very recent change where taking a photograph was almost always a 1:1 photo to print ratio. It’s very new the idea that everyone is carrying around an internet connected video camera that can publish live to billions of people. This absolutely changes the calculus and laws should be updated accordingly.
I don’t know what that should look like but it seems we should acknowledge that this activity is primarily commercial (clout is marketing and/or brand value a/k/a goodwill in accounting parlance) and that laws intended to protect art making maybe don’t / shouldn’t protect this form of commerce as much as they seem to presently.
To be clear: if you are in public and someone takes a recognizable photo of you eg your face and uses it to sell perfume congratulations on being beautiful and also call a lawyer because that use is not protected just because you were in a public space.
But you can make a print hang it in a gallery and sell it for whatever price you want. (AFAIK). Maybe there’s more nuance— could you put it in a book of your work and sell it? On the cover? Make postcards? NFT’s (remember those?) etc.
Anyway there are already limits and we should maybe enforce the ones that we have in some of these circumstances. I wonder if it’s already happening- I can’t be the first person to view this activity as commercial right? There must already be precedent somewhere.
Just like how every YouTube gear review says “company X sent me this but they have no say and no money changed hands” is pretending it’s not a sponsored video. It’s absolutely a sponsored video. 1. You are paid for views 2. People watch reviews on “release day” aka embargo day 3. If you get the product later you will have less views and less money, and you will miss the window of product hype cycle.
So just like every not sponsored review video is absolutely sponsored live-streaming a kids birthday or whatever is commercial and you need model releases. I guess these people will have to post notice of filming warnings at the door along with the balloons.
Genuinely curious, not trolling, why is it considered acceptable to spray plastic pellets into the woods?
Why is it considered acceptable to shed millions of tons of tire dust in to cities where people live and breath.
In the order of environmental issues, these plastic pellets are insignificant.
If you want to get up in arms about something, look at how many container loads of plastic feedstock falls off of ships per year and you'll see a problem a million times bigger.
On one hand: You are not nearly as important or meaningful as you think, and no ones brain will store and index your face for more than the length of the video. With online content the way it is now, you are a blade of grass in a continental sized grassland. It should be liberating to understand how little anyone actually cares.
On the other hand: The threat of being fed into a future AI-god is real, the the downstream effects unknown.
This is an issue a lot of gyms are facing; idiot "influencers" coming in and not caring who or what they film. It is really up to the private establishment to set rules for taking images and video within their facilities, but most will allow it because they want that almighty dollar to continue flowing in.
This is one of the reasons I use the free county gym — there are no influencers here (it's bare bones dudes slamming weights, only). I used to pay for a membership at a higher-end local establishment (and could still afford to), but got tired of all the glimglam of social gyms. The only thing I miss is the yoga class.
Is the airsoft range on public property? If not, you could probably complain to the owners. If its on public property then you probably can't do much about it except complain to YouTube and ask them to take it down.
>I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly
I must be living in a parallel universe of airsoft players. I can't possibly imagine anyone in that space changing their ways because somebody kindly asked them to
One time I rented and apartment (in California), and the agreement said they can make promotional media with me. I tried to fight it, but they didn't really care -- big real estate company is not going to redline legal agreement for me.
>Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me.
Why?
I dont ask this dismissively. Im not suggesting he's unjustified. That's just the interesting question to me and the author doesnt explore it. I believe this feeling is a new trend.
I dont think people had these qualms, say, 20 years ago. The world was a very different place back then. At the end of the day I suppose it's because 20 years ago, even with a totally permissive policy, you'd never expect footage of you to reach any significant amount of people. It would rarely happen and when it did there wouldnt be a huge audience to share it with.
But does it go beyond that? Would people have cared even if it did reach a wide audience? Is it possible people seek more privacy and control over their image than before? And not just as a reaction to how global everything is because of the internet? Gen Z being afraid of answering phone calls, etc.
This strikes me as similar to the attitude towards phone number privacy. People used to publicly share their phone numbers by default. You were included in the phone book unless you specially requested not to be. Now it feels invasive for parties to ask you for it, even when they have some plausible reason.
Social media is why. 20 years ago social media was not what it is today. The dynamics have changed.
For me, the "why" is a mix of:
1- ubiquity: now, virtually everyone's got a device capable of capturing high quality photo/video of you at any time
2- discoverability: social media gives anything the potential to go viral which might put you in the spotlight or limelight, and the frequency at which things can go viral "enough" is way higher (more platforms, larger follower counts, etc) (this is I assume what you meant by "reach")
3- "content creators" are everywhere: people want to turn anything into something, through all kinds of incentives that were unavailable 20 years ago, so it's a much more active "capture and use it" context
Things just aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
What changed?
Awareness and prevalence of dragnets, AI, surveillance economy.
Unfortunately, being serious about privacy is socially damaging. I've experienced it.
I eventually accepted that being outside my home meant I gave up on my privacy. I still take it seriously in my home and online, but not in public.
I'd love to see the culture shift on this, but I won't hold my breath.
Then don't make them and be happy.
Perhaps it is a generational gap, but the idea that I have to justify NOT attempting to squeeze a hustle out of absolutely everything I do reduces my trust in any content generated in [current year] as nothing more but a carefully crafted advertising space.
> I could, I suppose, ask each person that I see with a camera “would you mind not including me in anything you upload, please?”. And, since everyone with whom I’ve spoken at games, so far anyway, has been perfectly pleasant and friendly, I’d be hopeful that they would at least consider my request. I have not done this.
I feel like the reasonable place to start is here no? Why write this whole post when this would probably be easier?
Even simpler, have a discussion with the group once and have cameras either be prohibited on all days except X, or allowed on all days except X, depending on the majority preference.
> when this would probably be easier?
I don't think it would be. It sounds incredibly tedious in the long run.
Doesn't a LIDAR break digital cameras?
Maybe those who don't want to be filmed should be walking around with some portable LIDAR device, de facto breaking the cameras of people who don't respect their desire to not be filmed.
don't tell author about new meta glasses everybody and their grandma will wear 24/7 in 10y. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283306
They probably are very aware, and it makes having this discussion more important, not less.
Google Glass has been a thing for 12 years, Snapchat's glasses have been around for 9. And you rarely see someone using them. (I'm aware of reports of ICE officers wearing the Meta glasses, but this is probably an extension of norms around police bodycams)
I relate some to the premise but for an entirely different reason than privacy.
Simply one of my less common hobbies has an incredibly high hit rate of gimmick social media accounts stealing videos for their own profit, with zero credit, while highly misrepresenting things. A problem not nearly unique to the hobby nor any one type of media, but a problem plaguing it nonetheless.
Its basically pushed an already obscure hobby even more so.
I feel like this a lot of the time too.
The author describes the sentiment nicely. I don’t like it, it feels icky but I also don’t ask people to stop. I just wish that culturally it wasn’t assumed to be ok by default
Social dance (swing, Latin, etc) has some of this too. I think generally where most scenes have fallen is “only film yourself and your friends, unless it’s something intentionally performative like a jam circle or competition, in which case go nuts.”
Not to mention EDM festivals. Remote bush doofs where everyone is off their chops, escaping reality, dancing during the day, exposed in the light.
Being recorded in 4k from different angles including action cams on people's heads on the dance floor, is a far cry from the relative anonymity of festivals of old. I remember when the only people who'd see you all bright eyed and bushy tailed were other participants in the party mayhem, which is how it should be.
I don't want to be someones "content", even if it is due to my rougish good looks and a suave mix of bond with john wick on the airsoft battlefield.
You can always leave or ask the airsoft organizers to make new rules. The more interesting question is whether there's some legal avenue to avoid being someone's "content".
Reality TV has to get consent + releases so where is the line?
I have changed my mind on this topic recently. I believe that when you video in public everyone that gets videoed should require explicit permission or their face and voices should be removed. The only exceptions would be videoing public servants and if a crime is being committed. Videoing for private consumption would also be allowed in my opinion but not if it's posted in a way that more than a handful of people could see or if its uploaded to a site.
With AI this is entirely possible and if you are going to post videos on youtube or anything, you should be able to afford the removal of non-verified participants.
In Airsoft, there's a niche audience for people wanting to see other people get hit. Just like there's a niche audience for people who like watching car crashes. Just like there's a niche audience for people who like...
While you may not like being recorded, the player is well within their right to do so. Just label them a "mech" and award 5 points for the take down. If you have a squad of filmers, put them all together. Your problem is now isolated to the roaming mech beast in the woods. Flank right and live out your day.
Somehow you eventually have to square the fact that if you do things outside of your home, you are going to run into other people, who are very much going to do whatever they want, regardless of any existing laws, customs, or mores. And factor that into your decision making.
I am not a lawyer.
In the USA, anyone is allowed to photograph, video, or otherwise record anything they can see from a public sidewalk, subject to some soft restrictions like it being illegal to impede the movement of others. Any attempt by law enforcement or others to restrict this would likely fail in the courts.
Folks can get pretty upset by this in the real world.
The story is about a person on private grounds. They could talk to the owner and ask them to make a rule about no filming, but the owners probably like filming because if a cut goes viral on their airsoft grounds, it's like free advertising.
i'm not going to address the central complaint, but what i think is weird about this version is the venue: everybody is essentially wearing a disguise, and you could consciously disguise yourself even more with no inconvenience except less of a chance of being hit in the face with a paint ball
This behaviour is a thousandfold worse when you have kids, especially at social gatherings like birthday parties. Other parents (at least in my age cohort) assume it is OK to film them and post it to whatever social media they have without even asking.
Here in Germany we are about to start our daughter in pre-school ("kita") and every single parent had to fill out a few forms explicitly stating if they were ok or not ok with having photos or videos taken of their child (both by staff and by other parents).
Yeah, I am not looking forward to Meta glasses being widely used. But that is probably inevitable. Being anonym in public will be a dear memory from the past.
Agree with author. Laws do not necessarily dictate right vs. wrong. Filming others to publicly share that video may be legally allowable, is unethical regardless of the laws. It's like those crazy people who start playing their social media feed without headphones in public places like airplanes, or bathroom stalls....it's so weird, and annoying.
In the context of airsoft I guess you could cover yourself completely and why not shoot yellow plastic bullets at the cameraman.
The cost of filming is very low. Even people who aren't interested in taking pictures or filming now have a camera with them at all times.
I remember a village in Africa about 20 years ago where people thought cameras stole their soul.
Technology steals everything it can. I mean think of all the data that went into google maps or chatgpt, to only name a couple of apps.
this is exactly about what is legal or not. If I remember correctly in Germany there's a distinction about people being the focus of a photograph or people in the background. You can e.g. publish a picture of a public place without asking everybody on that place for their consent. Another corner case would be filming police brutality. What if the police officers in question wouldn't like to be photographed being brutal!? Local laws do apply.
This law badly needs to be updated to account for the fact that photo/video resolutions have massively increased since it was written, and "not the focus of a picture" is no longer enough to prevent you from being identified/tracked in the picture, which was the original intent.
Have you seen the cameras on cell phones compared to the cameras of yesterday? Resolutions are up but faked through software. A 640 picture from 2004 can be enlarged with clearer detail compared to a 2000px of today always looking sharp but never truly capturing a clear picture.
Private site. The event site could hold events where cameras are forbidden. There are other examples like spas or swimming pools where cameras are forbidden.
Seems like the most reasonable answer would be to have days where no video was permitted, and days where it is. Then you can attend on the days where no video is permitted but the ones who like creating and uploading videos can have their chances as well.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
Not wrong, it’s rude.
Be nice to just live without needing to feel like crowd sourced surveillance all the time.
There's several caveats to this but generally it seems silly to me to worry about people posting pictures with you in it. It seems a bit selfish to me to be concerned about "your image" being out in public instead of living in the moment.
I think though, with the internet and social media came 2-3 generations that really wanted to share what was going on in their lives with other people and with that came harsh resistance to even being in the background of someone's picture.
I thought this post was going to be about not wanting to share their hobby in a blog, pictures, or video form. This is something I have struggled with, because I would like to get started with blogging and a podcast but I have held back because a lot of people are so mean and harsh with their replies and I tend to take things so personally that it really hurts and keeps me from doing it.
How does the new Denmark "copyright on your body, face and voice" work in this aspect? I read that the intention is to combat deepfakes but does it also work for uses like this?
It wouldn't do anything in this case. Its only about manipulated media content that imitate personal characteristics.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
We are getting monitored all the time, we are in an age where cameras are omnipresent. Everyone carries one in their pocket in the form of a smartphone, and countless stationary cameras are installed throughout cities.
When you walk through streets, buildings, and especially public facilities, you can see cameras almost everywhere. While it is often said that these devices exist only for security purposes and that footage is routinely deleted, this is no longer the reality. In many cases, people can request this footage through FOIA and use it as they wish, including uploading it to platforms like YouTube.
> In many cases, people can request this footage through FOIA and use it as they wish, including uploading it to platforms like YouTube.
Please don’t assume the world is limited to the US. In Europe you cannot do that.
When I worked for a us company, as a European, i filed a foia. And then a gdpr request from their eu branch. Both were successful- i corrected some information i knew to be incorrect, and there are now signs by each 'hidden' camera.
> We are getting monitored all the time
That doesn't make it right, so we should keep questioning it until it's right.
Being monitored, or tracked or stalked, is different from having your photo published.
Well I never liked bigger Airsoft events - going into some abandoned buildings with 5-10 guys we know well to play was always best fun for me.
Downside is you cannot do that in current circumstances.
Clearly, author needs to work on their camouflage skill like John Cena.
I can relate, and it's especially concerning when it comes to my child ending up in videos (and pictures) by random people.
Have you considered taking up your hobby in Afghanistan? Somewhat tongue in cheek, but a locality under the Taliban have ratified a morality law that bans photography of living things https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-taliban-media-moralit...
I feel like I can't really have fun and be myself when I see people shooting video all around me.
I like to be silly with my kids and close friends, I like to act out around the people who find me fun or funny. But the rest of the world would ridicule me, or make fun of me, or make me a meme possibly.
This makes me sad because as a young man I could just be out there and fun, and at the end of the day, I held a place in the memories of my closest friends, maybe a handful of bystanders. But today, I could be gif'd and immortalized for my silly actions without my permission.
I disagree with the sentiment, you're in public, it's fair game. That just means I have to bend to your world-view, and you don't have to be considerate of mine.
This is a concern I also have in youth sports. People are filming practice and games then posting that on social media and sometimes the goal is to show their child (sometimes as young as 5) "embarrassing" someone's else's child with a move. It's unfortunately very common.
I think you can make arguments for and against the fundamental right to record or to not be recorded.
If someone is doing something bad/illegal, do we have a right to record/document it? If I am outside minding my own business and not doing anything bad, do I have a right to not be recorded?
What is the difference between seeing and recalling something that happened vs recording? What happens when technology blurs the difference (for example if we all start wearing and using camera AR glasses)?
A purely technology-minded compromise to this question (aka how to support both the "good" and "bad" kinds of recording), is probably something along the lines of expiry and enforcing a lack of permanence as the default (kind of like, the digital age recording-centric version of "innocent until proven guilty", which honestly is one of the greatest inventions in the history of human legal systems). Of course, one should never make societal decisions purely from a technological practicality standpoint.
Since you can't be sure what is "bad"/illegal, and people will just record many things anyways without thinking too much about it --> then the default should be auto-expiring/auto-deletion after X hours/days, unless some reason or some confirmation is provided to justify its persistence.
For example, imagine we lived in a near-future where AI assistants were commonplace. Imagine that recording was ubiquitous but legally mandated to default into being "disappearing videos" like Snapchat, but for all the major platforms (YouTube, TikTok, X, Twitch, Kick, etc.). Imagine that every day, you as a regular person doing regular things, get maybe 10000 notifications of, "you have been recorded in video X on platform Y, do you consent for this to be persisted?", and also law enforcement has to go through a judge (kind of like a search warrant) to file things like "persistence warrants", and then maybe there is another channel/method for concerned citizens who want to persist video of a "bad guy" doing "bad things" where they can request for persistence (maybe it's like an injunction against auto-deletion until a review body can look at the request)... Obviously this would be a ton of administrative overhead, a ton of micro-decisions to be made -- which is why I mentioned the AI-assistant angle, because then I can tell my personal AI helper, "here are my preferences, here is when I consent to recording and here is when I don't... knowing my personal rules, please go and deal with the 10000 notifications I get every day, thanks". Of course if there's disagreement or lack of consensus, some rules have to be developed about how to combine different parties wishes together (e.g. take a recording of a child's soccer game, where maybe 8 parents consent and 3 parents don't to persistence... perhaps it's majority rule so persistence side wins, but then majority has to pay the cost of API tokens to a blurring/anonymization service that protects the 3 who didn't want to be persisted -- that could be a framework for handling disputed outcomes?)
I'm also purposefully ignoring the edge-case problem of, what if a bad actor wants to persist the videos anyways, but in short I think the best we can do is impose some civil legal penalties if an unwilling participant later finds out you kept their videos without permission.
Anyways, I know that's all super fanciful and unrealistic in many ways, but I think that's a compromise sort of world-building I can imagine, that retains some familiar elements of how people think about consent and legal processes, while acknowledging the reality that recording is ubiquitous and that we need sane defaults + follow-up processes to review or adjudicate disputes later (and disputes might arise for trivial things, or serious criminal matters -- a criminal won't consent to their recording being persisted, but then society needs a sane way to override that, which is what judges and warrants are meant to do in protecting rights by requiring a bar of justification to be cleared).
I think the laws around this are fairly antiquated. People should clearly have the right to photograph in public, however, I strongly believe that should someone take someone else’s photograph they shouldn’t need their consent to post the photo publicly or monetize it in anyway. Obviously, there should be some limited car outs like public servants in the commission of their duties, legitimate news organizations, use in court etc.
Edit: I don’t think k posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public, but rather anything the general public has access to.
The laws in Switzerland are actually what you're describing.
In the whole EU, I think.
I think you meant "they should need their consent to post", right?
Yes I did
Check out first amendment auditing for a look at the edges of this at least in the USA.
I feel this about all of the AI notetaking bots that everyone is adding to web meetings these days:
“Welcome to the meeting. Your voice is now being recorded and sent to a server somewhere in the world to be processed by an AI and you have zero control over it. If we were to get hacked, it will be impossible to you know if your voice will be synthesized and used to scam, abuse, or any other nefarious purposes between now and the end of time. Happy meeting!”
I’ve seriously been in meetings with 3+ AI bots from different companies I’ve never heard of.
On the flipside, if I'm attending a meeting, I should have a right to my choice of disability assistance. I have glasses to deal with vision impairment, and notetaking assistance to deal with short term memory impairment. The AI is a part of cybernetic "me", rather than the platform.
As a street photographer this constant video/livestreaming culture shift in the last 10 years has made it really hard to not make folks uncomfortable when out in public.
Wow, such a nice idea with the purple lanyard it would be great to have something like this in general, walking down the streets someone films you and them or even YT or viewers to scan/flag the videos in question. I guess EU could put forth such regulation - no biggie. Maybe we could also create a framework on existing legislation - design a lanyard, put a QR on it leading to a "I do not consent" site. Advertise it a bit and I'm sure it would be newsworthy, at-least in EU, not sure about the rest of the world.
I think even better option is some type of public opt-in. Maybe purple or green screen lanyard. Publishing material of anyone without one would not be allowed.
Doesn't seem too big ask to edit out anyone who has not opted-in. Especially in age of AI that should make it trivial.
Sorry, but why even care about this? Is it an invasion of your privacy if strangers see you walking down the street? If no, how is strangers seeing you walking down the street in the background of some youtube video a privacy violation??
Great idea, and soon there will be a "I accept to be recorded in public" button you need to press before you're let out of your house.
> I guess EU could put forth such regulation - no biggie
Yes! Another EU regulation will solve this right quick.
Well, actually this could be just a means of letting people know your preference without direct communication. Maybe it could fall under existing GDPR regulation, as an extended part about a public "non consent" marker.
How would you solve the problem in large scale, low effort way?
Ah yes, identifying people with special items has always worked extremely well to protect freedoms.
I agree with the author, and it Reminds me of people who video at the gym. I think it goes to a deeper issue in our society: people love taking video of other people, and then put them on the internet, which always runs the risk of being turned into a meme, etc.
I lament that this guy may have to wear a mask, And I wish more venues had no photography or video. The last thing I wanted to go to the gym and working out, and I accidentally glance over at someone, who videotaped it, and then put me on the internet with some caption..
I agree and it bugs me too.
Sometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.
I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
>I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
My first experience akin to this happened when I was at the grocery store during Covid. This guy stood near the checkout lines and just did a big arc with his phone filming all of us and mocking masks. Like the author of the blog sometimes I’m just like “it’s not worth it” but I had one of my kids with me and when I asked the guy to stop, he started ranting at me about how he uses an app that blurs faces, it’s a free country, etc. I just moved on but it’s like… dude, we’re all just trying to get through the day out here and I’m with my kid at the grocery store. Do I really need to be putting up with this crap?
I imagine if people actually start wearing any of these smart glasses in any appreciable number these experiences will be sadly pretty typical.
Yeah, because he's right, it is a free country. He shouldn't be arrested, or thrown in prison for it.
But I'm also free to apply societal pressure to behave like a grown-up.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Well, here is the heart of the disagreement. I suspect everyone agrees that the social norms are "clear," they just vehemently disagree about what those norms are.
I don't know anything specific about the implicit cultural norms of airsoft, but it sounds like the author is playing at a privately owned facility which I would expect to have very explicit rules and liability waivers. I'd be surprised if those rules don't cover photography.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I find these kinds of argument somewhat odd, as they imply that "this kind of thing" is some unacceptable violation of clearly pre-established rights.
Rather, one must realize that existing in society always had the implication of being visible to society, and that public spaces are just that: a place accessible to all, where if you chose to be you must also accept being observed by its other attendants.
Some physical public spaces might be crammed so full of people that it's hard to breathe, while others will have them few and far in between. Some virtual public spaces might be breaking records with their viewer counts, others will never be graced with the presence of an eyeball. Streamers just connect a physical public space with a virtual public space.
Being recorded and published in a final edit of an on-demand video is slightly different (and not implied in streaming), but that is a much older dilemma that we have had more time to adjust to and hammer out rights regarding, and few would really pay attention to someone recording on the street with anything other than slight curiosity.
So no. I believe this is the society you must accept being a member of. The only thing that has changed with time is the medium (memory and word-of-mouth, paintings, photos, video recording and finallys livestreaming), not the actions. But as important, being caught on rando streamer's camera will by default only contribute about as much to your internet fame (and loss of privacy) as going to the local grocery store.
(For those curious if age contributes to the standpoint, I'd fall in the 30-40 bucket.)
Aim for the expensive kit.
Many people are claiming it is legal but it's not that simple in Europe and the UK.
It is legal (in most places) to film people in public but it is not necessarily legal to post the video to social media.
The Irish Data Protection Commission says:
> There is nothing in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that prohibits people from taking photos in a public place. Provided you are not harassing anyone, taking photographs of people in public is generally allowed and most likely will qualify for the household exemption under Article 2(2)(c) of the GDPR.
> However, what you do with that photo can potentially become a data protection issue, for example, if the photograph, which contained the personal data of individuals, was sold for commercial gain or was posted publicly on a social media account. Under those circumstances, you are likely to be considered a data controller which brings with it a host of obligations and duties under data protection law. In particular, it would be necessary for you to demonstrate, amongst other things, your lawful basis for the processing of such personal data under Article 6(1) of the GDPR.
>well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces
equates to
>you only have to worry about surveillance if you are doing something wrong.
This is, 100% guaranteed, a systematically injected narrative.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I feel the same way, but that's just not reality anymore. If you go outside your home, you're on camera. If your home faces your neighbor's door, you're probably on camera even in your own home unless you have constant obstruction of your windows and doors. I regularly see camera on apartment doors surveilling the interior of secure high-rise residential buildings. Guess you just gotta know when unit 18A takes out the trash...
This is mostly a joke, but objects in fantasy land are sometimes closer than they appear.
Major cloud compute and OS infra providers should provide a global opt-out of public bystander-recording. OK, record me, but it will be known by my face, location stamps from my device, etc, that it's me, and post-processing will anonymize me.
Legitimate public interest? EG, I stole your car and it's on tape? Sure, provide the cloud provider with a warrant for 'originals'.
Switch to paintballs and shoot the cameras.
This made me chuckle remembering the time a friend photographed a dog in a bicycle in Berlin and was yelled at by the owner until the photo was deleted. Photographing a pet crossed a big red privacy line. Seems absurd, but I think sensitivity to the phenomenon the author is noting will vary by country.
That does sound absurd indeed.
What if the dog was on the lam?
https://xkcd.com/642/
A very valid and timely concern, in my opinion!
I feel like at least part of the issue is that the internet is a different kind of public than everywhere else. it's not transient, and it's not limited to the people who happened to be in the same part of public as you at the same time. instead it's a fully-automatable, permanent record that is 100% available to all present and future humans. that deserves consideration to my mind.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
I think this is the rule that is currently under renegotiation in society. At one point you could imagine saying "I should be able to go out in public without having had a certain medical procedure (like a vaccine)." Now, I don't agree with that.
The overton window of behaviours is always shifting and not always in ways that we like.
Just tell the other person "please blur my face out if you publish this online" in 2025, this is easy to do.
Running around littering the forest with plastic, and he is concerned about his privacy. This is the state of modern man.
I think the issue is "available to the whole world". "Back in the day" people would take photos or even videos (remember camcorders?) and it wasn't a big deal because well, only that person would have it and maybe show it to some friends or family (or give you a copy).
But now it means archived for the whole world to see, potentially forever. 30 years from now, someone might dig it up.
So it's not so much about the photography (which as someone pointed out, might be allowed in public places), it's about posting the photos/videos into a potentially eternal public archive.
This is a very reasonable concern in the general case, but airsoft in particular is probably one of the few social activities where it’s not entirely out of place to wear a balaclava and tinted goggles.
I understand the overall sentiment of the post, but in this particular example, isn’t everyone who’s playing airsoft wearing a full face mask anyways?
> I am very much enjoying my newly-resurrected hobby of Airsoft. Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people
What's wrong with you?
I don’t understand the author, everyone in airsoft wears masks? You’re an anonymous person, just a brief obstacle the cameraman shoots quickly on his way to the real fire fight.
It's a legally grey area. In most countries, you can't really stop people from shooting video and photos in public spaces. But you can do something about publishing the material. Most stock photography websites and similar websites will insist on permission from identifiable individuals in photos or videos for this reason. And a lot of conferences or fairs will give notice of the fact that there will be photos and videos taken at such events (thus clearly marking them as public events). I've seen that here in Germany at least.
And this is a sensitive topic here. Some people here get upset if you point a camera at them and will aggressively demand that you delete their photo. I've seen that happen a few times (not to me). Some people really get pissed off over this here and they tend to known their rights. So good luck arguing otherwise.
If you look at the rules here, they are quite sensible. You can't just publish photos or videos with recognizable people in them unless it's clearly a public event (like a demonstration, concert, etc.). Taking the photos is mostly OK (up to a point). And there's an exemption for private photos. But you can't just publish photos with people recognizably in them unless falls under the narrow set of exceptions to that rule.
Photos of people actually count as personally identifiable information under GDPR. So, people can object to that being stored by companies, ask for it to be removed, and companies need valid reasons for storing such photos.
In this case, the person is in the UK where people simply have less protections against this. Which is something the tabloid press there tends to abuse by trying to get photos of famous people in private / embarrassing situations by all means possible. That would be a lot less legal in Germany and expose you to lawsuits if you were to do that. The German tabloid press has a rich history of that happening.
In the US in most states it's illegal to monetize the image of children [without consent] unless it's just incidental to the film.
I'd imagine if 17 year olds were allowed you could make it legally dicy enough for someone that they'd not want to do it, if they were profiting off of it.
This only applies to airsoft and paintball, but don’t players wear full on masks for both protection and camouflage?
No alternative's being made. Only considering his own feelings, everyone else should follow. Expects people to not film (read: shoot) him because he asked. Neil's a bit of a Karen in this one I'm afraid.
I'm surprised that YouTube doesn't have a "blur everyone's faces except for me" feature to post process on videos
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
This is not clear at all to me.
When you go into public you’re accepting that you might be filmed. The reality is that you are being filmed constantly. It’s just that it bothers you sometimes.
It reminds me of The Light of Other Days (a book about a society where technology makes any privacy impossible). Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
The good news about this is that hardly any normal person would ever watch these Airsoft videos for more than 5 or 10 seconds.
> Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
Perhaps this article being #1 on HN right now is evidence that your perspective is not the same as "nearly everybody" else
The evidence I present is that I have never seen someone complain about someone else filming in public. I’m not sure that the articles position on HN says anything about the majority opinion on a topic, only that it’s of interest.
To be fair the sentence prior I thought made clear I was referencing the plot of the book.
So you only have to worry about consequences from not-normal people, and that's the good news?
EDIT: to bring a specific real-world example: A friend of mine does classes at a local studio that also offers martial arts courses, and some of the local right-wing bubble has gotten it in their head that this has to be "antifa combat training" and keeps screaming that this needs to be monitored. The current local government has been ignoring them, but a lot of people are probably quite happy now that there isn't an easy-to-get public record of who was there and "needs a visit".
No, you only have to worry about the consequences from everyone.
You certainly dont want the government defining “not normal” people. Or maybe you do!
It’s frustrating when there’s a problem and you know any solution to it is worse than the problem itself.
For instance, in my area we’ve recently had a couple Nazi demonstrations. People with swastika flags and “Hitler was right” signs. I’d like that to go away.
But to attempt to use law to do anything about it would mean allowing someone to choose what others can and cannot say in public. That’s worse, or at least at some point it will be.
This is very much like that (though of course far less nefarious) and you just have to let people take paintball videos. Imagine if we didn’t let people video anything they want in public. How many instances of police brutality would go unpunished. That’s worse.
My advice: start a paintball league and make that the rule. And yeah, it does suck to have to suddenly become an event planner just to not end up on YouTube but welcome to the future I guess.
I was having a similar discussion regarding the Renn faire this weekend. It's silly fun, but it used to be you could dress up as your persona and escape for a while (see also: larping, SCA, or really any number of similar outlets) . However now everything is being recorded, and those recordings act both as unwanted publicity and as a method of cultural mining and extraction
What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.
Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with
Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
Attention-seeking behaviors (such as an obsession with recording everything and putting it online) are unhealthy and a possible symptom of anti-social traits such as narcissism.
Unfortunately for all of us, if public-by-default becomes the norm, then this is gonna lead to even more social cooling, more conformism and less freedom.
Their venue, their rules. If you don't like them, go to somewhere else or run with airsoft "gun" alone.
> vim over emacs
Hell Yes lol
worth looking into Camera Lucida by roland barthes, sontag's on photography and for something more recent, bernard stiegler's writings on cameras as technics if interested in some of the headier aspects of what cameras and photography do to culture and human relationships (as opposed to, say, legal implications). i tend to agree with the author: the presence of cameras in community spaces have completely ruined my relationship to those spaces. ive seen people here call the author a karen which, maybe, but the last time i went to a small DIY rock show in my community there were more people taking pictures than there were watching the show. what value is it if everyone films and uploads a set from a local band on youtube? what is the point?
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
In the US the legal doctrine is no privacy at all in public spaces (a lot more expansive than that actually), that's probably where those comments come from.
There are plenty of US states with two-party consent for recording (audio, mostly, but in some cases video as well)
Ok but it's a UK domain talking about an activity in the UK
He acknowledges the issue in the article, but doesn’t seem to grasp it fully.
Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
I think this argument is logically flawed. When you say public means not private you are glossing over the fact that public never before meant "available via digital media to the world." Instead it mean a public which had a localized context. Doesn't mean you are wrong, but you're paving over this obvious fact.
But what practical difference does it have that it's "available via digital media to the world."? Are you just opposed to people not in your physical location seeing you? Why?
"noticing" is not the same as "permanently documenting and broadcasting to the internet". Used to be one needed to get signed photo releases from passerbys who appeared in your shots...
yep, it's the permanent nature of the recording put in to the public sphere that is the game changer for me.
I accept I am visible in public to all who share a space but I do not accept that the ephemeral nature of my existence in that space should be violated.
Any chance you're relatively young?
I've noticed that folks born after some point in the early 2000's tend to feel this way, and they don't even realize that the survellience in 1984 was meant to be problematic, or why it might feel that way to others
It seems that the panopticon has been normalized successfully.
Old. If I don't want to be seen somewhere, I either: don't go there, or sneak. If I sneak and get caught, I should've snuck better.
I think doing a members-only activity on private grounds is the opposite of public
Airsoft is probably played in a private woodland.
I disagree. Filming Airsoft is no more intrusive than filming football matches or paintball. It’s a public-facing hobby where documenting the experience is part of the culture, and that’s a big reason the sport grows and attracts new players.
UK law already strikes the right balance: you’re free to record in public or semi-public spaces unless there’s a specific ban, while also having protections against harassment or misuse. That’s a sensible framework we should never dilute with “consent-by-default” rules, which would only stifle creativity and community sharing. If you join a hobby where cameras are standard, it’s fair to expect that presence, not to restrict others’ enjoyment because of hypothetical discomfort.
If you don’t like that, nothing stops you from setting up your own private games with different rules
I found this frustrating to read. First the other airsoft participates he seems to seem to be okay with people filming. There is clearly no expectation of privacy.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
>
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
I don't like it that things are recorded around the clock or by anyone and be broadcast anywhere, but the ship on this has sailed long ago.
> In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby). > > But then I’ve seen the same at (private) conferences, with people saying “Of course I’m free to take photos of identifiable individuals without their consent and publish them online”.
Again is there an expectation of privacy? Are people told that they are not allowed to use their cameras?
It is whether the is a expectation of privacy. A McDonald's or a Burger King is "private property", but there is no expectation of privacy. I would not expect privacy at an airsoft, paint-balling or any other outdoor activity even if it is on private property.
A public toilet cubical is a public place with an expectation of privacy.
> Publishing someone’s photo online, without their consent, without another strong justification, just because they happen to be in view of one’s camera lens, feels wrong to me
It depends whether there was an expectation of privacy as whether it should feel wrong. If there isn't an expectation of privacy. Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
> This isn’t about what is legal (although, in some cases, claims of legality may be poorly conceived), but around my own perceptions of a private life, and a dislike for the fact that, just because one can publish such things, that one should.
How else is this supposed to be tacked if not by what is legally permissible?
> There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.
> Then this is nothing else than you "not liking it".
The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them. If someone came to Switzerland and started complaining that they can't install a doorbell camera, then it would also be a case of them 'not liking it' - but they have a right to voice their opinion.
> Well that entirely depends on the country - in the UK it is true, but it wouldn't be true in Switzerland or Germany, where you do have the right to privacy even in public spaces.
Obviously the law is different in different places.
However. The person is talking about Newbury which I used to live near, which is in the UK. So they are talking about their experience in the UK.
So the only law the is applicable here is UK law.
> The author knows what the laws are, but presumably disagrees with the reasoning behind the laws and is criticising them.
He specifically says at the end "This isn’t about what is legal". I also don't believe he understands the law, since he often conflates/misuses the use of term private throughout the entire article.
What he understands as private isn't what is understood by almost anyone (both legal and colloquially).
>There is no expectation of privacy in any place that is considered public.
I had a guy at Walmart yesterday call the cops on me because I took a picture of the strip mall it was in on a small point and shoot and he assumed I was for some reason taking a picture of him, his wife, and kid. He was literally just a random car in the middle of a public parking lot. The officer talked to him and asked that I stepped away and then she came to me. The conversation went exactly like this.
Before she could even start to talk I told her I assumed that she knew that there was no expectation of privacy in public and that I could take a thousand pictures and there would be nothing that she could do about it. She agreed. She then asked if I'd like to give her my name (because she had no right to demand I do), and I said no I wouldn't like that. Then came the kicker. Would you like to just show me you don't have a picture of him. I said no I won't because I did nothing wrong and there's no reason for you to see my pictures. All of these were phrased as requests to bypass illegal search because she knew she was in the wrong even questioning me about it. People seem to really be the main character in the most boring story ever, at least in their minds. I have a healthy disregard for feigned authority anyway and was so indignant that I almost took some pictures of them while they talked. Trampling rights because Jim Bob is upset that someone dared take a picture in his direction rubs me the wrong way.
This. Im a dick and straight up demand people exclude me or stop filming. Consumers are ravenous for money making content and have no clue what a media business privacy, consent, and compensation legal framework even remotely look like. As someone who produced a few short documentaries in the early 2000s related to "hobbies", I would have never done so without full consent and compensation...
I don’t think you’re a “dick” for politely asking people not to film you, unless you’re unnecessarily aggressive about it.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
Agreed. Was going to post the same thing. It’s very much a debatable position.
I play soccer. There are ways to bring people down a peg if they do anything flashy, disrespectful, etc. We're not breaking legs of course, but you'll feel it the next morning if you've been a douchebag to your opponent.
In this case, you have a gun. Surely you can find a way to ruin this guy's day. He won't have much interesting footage if the other team agrees to end his shit as soon as the game starts like you would the flashy winger with fluorescent boots trying rainbow flicks.
It's clear that "privacy " in public spaces requires a fair bit of entitlement, why can't we all just love one another and let it go? What harm comes from being in someone's cool AirSoft video? Is it just a matter of principle that bothers you or something deeper?
For one thing, the video might have objectionable content edited into it.
For instance, one video could be filmed by a genocidal maga nutjob, and a second could be a documentary about how PLA doesn’t biodegrade, made by a woke LGBTQ+ immigrant with a working understanding of chemistry, physics and biology.
Almost 100% of the US would be upset to know they supported the production of at least one of those videos.
That they're upset does not mean that the world should bend to their feelings. I think you would agree that getting upset does not necessarily mean something is wrong externally, oftentimes things are wrong internally. Thank you for taking the time to reply
> well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces
That's the correct answer. End of the story.
It is our consensus of what "public space" means and one can do with it (which varies depending on where you are) that forms a lot of our social norms and society. It is why hang drying clothes is acceptable/normal in many parts of the world but not in the US. It is why people are expected to wear at least some clothes. It is why you can take photos of random people, including kids, without their/their parents' consent in the US in public space.
If you think you are so special to never show up in a photo, don't be in the public in the first, or wear a mask, a hat plus sunglasses or something else. Celebrities have been doing this for forever.
> In any case, here, the issue is somewhat different, since it is a private site, where people engage in private activity (a hobby)
Not the end of the story. Photographing where people do not expect strong assurances of privacy is complex to enforce. Try photographing inside a stadium, at the Olympics, etc. Others around you might be photographing, but security might ask you to stop or leave.
Stadiums are private spaces. That should have been very obvious.
In case that's still not clear, you need a ticket to enter a stadium, unlike your local public parks or public library, or, like, streets.
Strong disagree.
The right to take photos of random people without consent in public spaces, is NOT the same as the right to publish those photos online for the world to see and as a theoretically permanent discoverable archive.
You must be extraordinarily naive to think that people take photos in public places without ever posting them online, by default.
And let me know one single instance where someone gets sued for posting a photo of someone appearing in public space in the US.
Huh? Hanging clothes is absolutely accepted in the US. I have a clothesline.
Including hanging underwears on the balcony in an apartment building? Try harder.