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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Your example makes me thing of something: what if we're all just less conscientious people online? Lots of people looked at the recent leaked celebrity pictures who wouldn't look into those peoples' windows. It's hard to argue that this is the result of the former being less wrong--the impact on the victim is identical. So it must be that people are just more willing to do "wrong" things on the internet. Should the law take this into account, especially when you're analogizing between the CFAA and breaking and entering, or cyberstalking and real stalking.

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>--the impact on the victim is identical.

Physical proximity matters. A remote person who seeks out and looks at the photos is probably at least an inconsiderate jerk. A person who trespasses onto your property and peeps into your windows is not merely an inconsiderate jerk, but represents a potential threat to one's physical safety.

We're not just less conscientious online (though we certainly are that). Technology also makes unethical, immoral, and criminal decisions much easier to make, often so easily that we don't realize that we've done it unless we go out of our way to reflect on it.

That isn't unique to the Internet though. That goes both for other technologies like cars, guns or publishing and "protected" activities like running a business, being a journalist or a lawyer. Maybe most importantly there has to be a reasonable balance between protection (liability) and enforcement (punishment).

>Should the law take this into account...

Definitely not. Doing so is to much of a slippery slope when extended to drugs/alcohol or anything else that has the effect of lowering inhibitions or increasing the likeliness of committing a crime where one might otherwise not.

That said I agree with your point there is a blurring of the line. Whereas in your example, one would have to actively go to someones private property and peep through a window until they caught what they were looking for, versus the internet where a picture practically comes to you, your only act is clicking (tptacek touched on this...maybe could be termed "lowering the barrier to criminal behavior"). So while the victim impact is the same as you say (I might even argue online is worse because there is greater/continued victimization), the acts are different in nature. Blurring the line further is that culturally the internet pictures are normalized in the sense that they are practically marketed via traditional news, social media and late night comedians as things to see rather than condemned as acts of victimization.

That is not an apt analogy at all and frankly I wish people would stop going out of their way to analogize things. The Internet has been around for a while now, so we should be able to see things, or at least discuss them, for what they are.

It's totally apt. Why is peeping into someone's window bad? It's because it's a violation of their privacy, and even if they don't know that someone is watching them, peoples' reaction to the prospect of that happening is enough to justify a social norm to dissuade such conduct. The operative mechanics,[1] are the same when it comes to looking at leaked pictures online. The act of looking doesn't metaphysically cause injury. It's the knowledge or the prospect of people looking.

[1] And that's the value of analogies--not just to help us understand things that are novel in terms of the familiar, but to help us think about how things are similar or different, which helps us cut to the heart of why we think about a thing in a particular way.

Peeping into someone's window is bad because it is trespassing and harassment.

Pictures do not passively "leak" online. Someone goes to the trouble of posting them. If that person didn't have permission to do so, they are the guilty party, not some random person who happens to see the picture, not even knowing who that picture is of.

This is the same as if the peeping tom snapped photos, and then shared them. You're not automatically a wrongdoer just because you see such a thing.

Pictures leaked before we had the Internet. Hello? We had scandals revolving around leaked photographs of famous people decades prior. Paparazzi also existed long before the Internet.

So if the victim doesn't know (can't be harassment), it's just trespassing, I.e. As bad as cutting across someone's lawn? I don't think your explanation captures the psychology here.

If anything sexualizing and dehumanizing celebrities is the cultural norm. Which isn't about the Internet per se. How cloud providers can have zero liability though...

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