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Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.

IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.

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Yes. There’s also something about the sheer volume of recorded media & ease of distribution which feels like we crossed a qualitatively different threshold. The laws around photography were set in an era when it cost money to take a photograph, the cameras were easier to notice and slower, and when someone took a photo it was highly unlikely that they’d share it widely. Now it’s basically impossible to avoid cameras, people take far more pictures than they used to, and anyone’s photos can reach large audiences and often easily linked back to you. There was nothing like the way random people could see someone having a bad day, post it, and half an hour later a million strangers have seen it - a newspaper or TV station could do that, but their staffers usually ignored things which didn’t have a legitimate news interest.

This feels kind of like the way you could avoid having extensive traffic laws & control systems in 1905 when only a few people had cars.

Private persons snapping a few shots here and there in public capturing someone’s likeness is a drop in the bucket compared to all the automated surveillance photography and video out there. Let’s address that first so we are not straining out gnats but swallowing camels.

It shouldn't, you wouldn't be able to photograph candid moments in public of your own family/group of friends if anyone's else face showed up in the picture, that's not a world I want to live in.

It would also completely kill any form of street photography, even if you don't appreciate the art it would kill documenting times and places for posterity, for what benefit exactly?

Strengthening of your right to privacy against an entirely new paradigm of state and individual surveillance. It is a new world.

I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.

I don't have a good answer for it all.

> I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.

We would not only lose an art form but also the recording of the past, a candid photo of today has a lot more value in 50-100 years, rather absurd to lose this. It wouldn't even guarantee anything, bad actors would continue to do so covertly.

I find it pretty hard to sacrifice it, it's a freedom, making society at large less free to fight tyranny doesn't seem the way to solve anything, e.g.: EU Chat Control bullshit.

I don't have a good answer either but I lean on the camp of seeking solutions that are smarter than a sledgehammer.

Laws have non-binary options - for example, most countries have laws controlling industrial-scale air pollution which do not prevent you from grilling at home.

In this case, I think it would be interesting to think about the most concerning area: linking a person in a photo to their real-world identity. It seems like there could be restrictions on how face-recognition databases are built and accessed, possibly incorporating intent to harass or intimidate as an aggravating factor, and possibly linking across time and place. If I take a picture of some guys playing basketball or chess as I walk around town, I don’t need to identify them in my art exhibit entry and I certainly don’t need to link one of them to a different time and place without their permission.

This is programmer thinking, laws aren't algorithms.

The laws regardless this almost always make a distinction between intentionally surveillance and by chance background noise. Taking a picture of the street with people on it doesn't matter, recording the street 24/7 probably does, and purposefully singling someone out and photographing them definitely matters.

We already kind of have this. Think about it - stalking is illegal, but you've walked behind people right? You've glanced into someone's window before, right? You've taken a picture of a random person before, right?

So why aren't you in jail? Because laws aren't algorithms

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