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Comment by necovek | Hacker News Reader

Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent: exceptions usually hold for taking photos of people where it is in the public interest to be able to show them or impractical to get consent. This covers large gatherings and celebrities, but a portrait photo of a stranger might put you on the wrong side of the law.

Obviously, the idea is to not disallow having someone take a photo of you as a background, passing figure as they take a front-and-center photo of their family, but not allow you to be the main subject unknowingly and especially when you object explicitly.

On the other hand, a photographer still owns the copyright to a photo, so a subject (including in a portrait) cannot claim it or distribute it without permission even if they can potentially stop the photographer from distributing that photo.

IANAL, but you are not by default allowed to use anyone's "likeness" for your individual profit.

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> Personal information usually does include photos of someone in public without their consent

This is not the case in the United States. There is no presumption of privacy in public. In fact, there is a whole genre known as "street photography" that involves taking pictures in public without explicit consent of the subjects.

This is true, and it may also be true that location tracking through surveillance networks crosses a line into violating one or more Constitutional rights. One of Flock's revenue streams is explicitly selling access to data made available by other customers. A commonly-cited example is the ability of local law enforcement to locate abortion suspects in other states using the Flock camera network [0]; one could imagine dragnet-style or geofenced queries to also cross the line.

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...

People keep making this claim that Flock "explicitly sells access to data", but the link you provided doesn't demonstrate that, and Flock contracts I've read contradict the claim.

I think what's happening here is that people are trying to colloquially define "selling access to data" to fit the camera data sharing that Flock enables, and then saying that because you have to pay to be a Flock customer to get access to that data, they're effectively selling it. I don' think that's how data brokerage laws work. Flock doesn't own the data they're providing access to, and they're providing that sharing access with the (avid!) consent of their customers.

You seem to be right, thanks for the correction!

If https://legalclarity.org/can-you-post-someones-picture-witho... is to be trusted though, at least you get protection from your likeness being used for commercial purposes, though that seems a bit more limited than I'd expect.

> In fact, there is a whole genre known as "street photography" that involves taking pictures in public without explicit consent of the subjects.

Try taking an upskirt photo of someone in public without their explicit consent. You'll find that there are limitations to that under both Federal and State laws.

You’re getting mixed up about commercial use and personal information.

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