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Comment by lnrd | Hacker News Reader

> Why is it a good thing?

For privacy related matters, as it's clearly designed to make it obvious that someone is taking a picture. It's good because it's an hidden camera targeted at mass market. The likelihood that it could be abused would be high if it would be trivial to do it.

> Aka the general public. Why should the not-you "general public" be restricted, but not you?

Everybody should be restricted by default. If someone from the general public finds a way to hack it and bypass this restriction, I hope they have good conscience to use it an an ethical way. For what I would like to use it, I believe it would be ethical (as for what's considered ethical among street photographers and concerning street photography laws where I live).

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Where I live, at least, if you're in public, there's no expectation of privacy. There's no valid legal objection to someone taking photos or videos.

Some exceptions:

- Commercial use of (recognizable) photos of people in public is regulated.

- Following someone around or getting in their face with a camera is harassment.

Of course, your right to take photos or videos stops the minute you step onto private property; the owners are within their rights to disallow it.

Your confusing legal right with expectation.

Really who cares if they can discretely take your photo out in public. You have no expectation of privacy in public and totally legal to take someone’s picture. In fact if they had say a Nikon p1000 they could very clearly take your picture from a mile away. Check out this zoom test and you can see people 3.5 miles away it will blow your mind. From a mile it would be trivial. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LhQlwKX3LQA&pp=ygUVbmlrb24gcDE...

That was incredible. It gave me vertigo.

What is also incredible is that the camera is only like $1300 USD. So totally obtainable for the average person.

The expectation of privacy in public changes in each country and with different laws. Where I live in the EU there is an expectation of privacy in public and it's illegal to take a picture of someone that portrays them in a bad or embarrassing way.

Given how easily it is already to take pictures and videos discreetly with smartphones and how it's already abused by all kind of people (especially younger generations), I say that for once Meta did a good thing (even though I'm sure they did it only to avoid bad PR given their reputation). Even if something is already bad doesn't mean everything new should be bad as well just because of it.

> For what I would like to use it, I believe it would be ethical (as for what's considered ethical among street photographers and concerning street photography laws where I live).

Define "street photographer" because I am embarrassed to be confused with the likes of you given I'm perfectly satisfied with my Leica M6 and Contax G2.

A street photographer is someone that takes photos (mostly of people) in the street.

I'm also embarrassed to be confused with someone that so easily judges other people and believes that mentioning some kind of equipments tells anything about them. Photography is about photos, if you think the camera you use gives you some special kind of status you are looking at this from a very wrong angle.

Imagine a painter believing he's better than other painters because he uses some expensive brand of brushes. Yeah, you are doing the same.

You have completely missed the entire point.

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