The throwaway line in TFA about village life and the section about common law recognizing no right to privacy both highlight my thoughts on this. In prior years we didn't have cameras preserving all our moments in 4K for all time, but as humans we had so little happening in our hamlets/villages, that most of our neighbors knew everything about us and all of our individual actions were never forgotten. Just like how you still remember all the embarrassing things different kids at your high school did (for me, 20+ years later). Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
Another critical shift in the last ~120 years is the ease with which private information can be productized.
I say 120 years because I believe the Kodak Brownie No. 2 was the inflection point. Other film cameras existed before that point, but did not have user-replaceable film - you would return the whole camera to Kodak and they'd send you back prints and a new camera.
Thus, before the Brownie No. 2, the camera's owner had never posessed the negative itself. For the first time, an indisputably real account of an event could be reproduced over and over, on demand, with a low financial barrier to entry, and in any shape or size the negative's owner could imagine.
Obviously, the internet age has come with its own staggering paradigm shifts. Sure, private information may not be more sensitive than it ever was. But, it is easier than ever before to distribute it for profit.
My issue is this. Or, more specifically, I think the actual privacy invasion doesn't come from the use of cameras, it comes from the use of databases.
I honestly don't care even a little if I happen to appear in (or even are the subject of) a random photo taken by a regular person. I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated snapshot/video.
The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
Yes, I know they may upload it to Facebook and such, where it is weaponized. That does bother me, but I choose to ignore that part except to make sure that my friends and family don't do it.
Other than targeted advertising, how has private (I think you meant personally identifiable) information been productized?
The only examples I can think of is auto insurers buying your vehicle usage data, and creditors buying your borrowing data. I don’t know if cameras or the Internet has anything to do with either case.
We did not need a strict law about privacy when the only way to surveil and preserve information was to use your eyes and brain. And given that everyone tends to be their own main character, even that level of preservation was not terribly effective.
The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it before it gets much worse.
I only remember the embarrassing things I did. And because I graduated in the pager era there are very few photographs to remind me of what I have forgotten.
And if you move away (to escape your past or for other reasons), any new village you move to will treat you as a tolerated outsider for 20+ years because you didn't go to the same kindergarten as them.
And, by and large, they were right to do so. In the absence of a very strong central government, the only way to protect yourself from criminals (or other social problems) is to assume all outsiders are problematic.
Allowing "escape your past" is generally not socially desirable.
There is a huge difference between people in your village, that you grew up with, knowing a lot about you, and strangers from halfway around the world knowing things about your personal life.
And more importantly the relationship was much more symmetrical - you know about as much about your neighbors as they know about you and for the most part neither has more power over the other. This is not true today where someone who you have never even heard of could be offended by something you said or did and choose to weaponize public knowledge against you.
> Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school
One BIG difference between high school and ordinary life is that high school is filled with a bunch of adolescents who are forced to be in a place where there isn't much to do for fun other than gossip about the other adolescents. Given that adolescence is a time when humans are maximally embarrassing and maximally interested in other adolescents' embarrassment, I don't think it's a good model for general life.
People in small towns and villages today do not act like high schoolers, and they are perfectly capable of keeping secrets from each other. You don't need a legally enshrined right to privacy when your most dangerous threat model is Fred down the street who is a nosy twerp.
Except you were always being watched by everyone, especially back then. If you did something the church didn't like, hoo boy would your friends and neighbors tell on you. Be gay, act like a "witch" etc...to the fire with you.
Yeah, the scale of things is different but the idea that everyone in your town (or your social circles) didn't know more or less everything about you is counterfactual.
I live in a mid/upper middle class ex-urb that is basically Mayberry - our police Facebook page literally has posts like "Angie your Lab got out again, she's at the station" with a picture of the dog sitting at the chief's desk. A big crime wave is when they randomly flush the high school kids from their yearly "fooling around" camp by the river because they got rowdy and mooned the families kayaking.
Yet somehow we now have about 100 flock cameras (and growing) recording every possible way in and out of town and at every subdivision entrance. It's crazy.
They are cameras installed by a private company - Flock Safety - but paid for by uni/gov. In theory they data warehouse the license plate numbers and "vehicle characteristics" of every vehicle that drives by each camera, but no one really knows the extent of the data they collect, how it is secured and stored, or what is required to access and use the information. As far as I can tell they are a favorite of communities that can afford them (which are already low-crime) and are never placed in low-income higher crime areas where they might actually be useful.
The pioneer of DeepFakes... "Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” "
That's genuinely creative. I mean the execution, not the act itself. Imagine spending hours in a darkroom to create passable smut and knowing there's a market for that. I guess it's true that any new tech will have one of its first applications dedicated to tickling our monkey brains
The real non-story in the article is describing the downright awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say the problem is cameras.
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
I love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity - that point out that the feeling of our age that things are changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.
It doesn't dispel the idea that things are changing too quickly. It reinforces that we are engaged in a never ending battle against exploitation and enslavement.
Yeah, I think with all major technological advancements we end up with logistic "S-curve" type growth, with a steep rise followed by an eventual plateau. At the start it can look like exponential growth heading toward a singularity, but that's just not realistic and growth always slows down and levels out eventually. Based on the degree and timescale though the two cases my feel pretty indistinguishable for individuals.
I think what has changed the most about our relationship with technology now a days compared to prehistory is the overall incentives for technology changing. It used to be technology had to actually improve something to be adopted. A bow and arrow was superior to throwing a stone, so it was adopted on merit. Sowing seed and animal husbandry was superior to migrating around seasonal harvest from uncultivated flora and game, so it was also adopted on merit. No one was marketing this shift.
Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
I think of a passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence:
"""
The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder.
"""
The lack of clear conclusion suggests a new likeness misuse wave is coming though I doubt it.
AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means.
None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.
The concern I have is less around using emulating a work and more around not compensating or crediting those whose work has been taken to enrich these companies.
Readit News
I say 120 years because I believe the Kodak Brownie No. 2 was the inflection point. Other film cameras existed before that point, but did not have user-replaceable film - you would return the whole camera to Kodak and they'd send you back prints and a new camera.
Thus, before the Brownie No. 2, the camera's owner had never posessed the negative itself. For the first time, an indisputably real account of an event could be reproduced over and over, on demand, with a low financial barrier to entry, and in any shape or size the negative's owner could imagine.
Obviously, the internet age has come with its own staggering paradigm shifts. Sure, private information may not be more sensitive than it ever was. But, it is easier than ever before to distribute it for profit.
I honestly don't care even a little if I happen to appear in (or even are the subject of) a random photo taken by a regular person. I care a lot if I appear in a commercially-operated snapshot/video.
The difference is that a regular person probably isn't going to include that photo/video and related metadata in a database where it will be combined with the contents of other databases and weaponized against me.
Yes, I know they may upload it to Facebook and such, where it is weaponized. That does bother me, but I choose to ignore that part except to make sure that my friends and family don't do it.
The only examples I can think of is auto insurers buying your vehicle usage data, and creditors buying your borrowing data. I don’t know if cameras or the Internet has anything to do with either case.
1. Neighbor X claims they saw {embarrassing thing}
2. Neighbor X has objective proof that the event occurred
3. Here's a picture of the event
4. Here's a picture which is endlessly duplicable and broadcastable
The rise of computers and the ability to record things in near perfect fidelity is a problem. I hope we can get a handle on it before it gets much worse.
Ancient Egyptians and Romans would seem to have relished such a problem.
Allowing "escape your past" is generally not socially desirable.
One BIG difference between high school and ordinary life is that high school is filled with a bunch of adolescents who are forced to be in a place where there isn't much to do for fun other than gossip about the other adolescents. Given that adolescence is a time when humans are maximally embarrassing and maximally interested in other adolescents' embarrassment, I don't think it's a good model for general life.
People in small towns and villages today do not act like high schoolers, and they are perfectly capable of keeping secrets from each other. You don't need a legally enshrined right to privacy when your most dangerous threat model is Fred down the street who is a nosy twerp.
Dead Comment
it's personal cameras or from the muni/gov?
Or further back: "Zog, why you paint other head on cave-wall of fertility goddess!?"
> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"
Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.
Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?
You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.
it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.
[1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...
Deleted Comment
Meanwhile we have a lot of technology where its only incentive is not to be thermodynamically easier to an alternative, but to make someone money. Sometimes the technology is even less efficient than the alternative, but its perpetuated and expanded and iterated upon because it is so lucrative. I think once we hit this point with technology is when the singularity really kicked off. Not recently or in the future but potentially in the time of Ea-Nasir and his ingots.
""" The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. """
Deleted Comment
AI's super power is melding many styles to better effect. My scraped up social media artworks are being considered to such a minuscule degree by the LLM that my likeness is lost unless someone tries to hone in and pass it off as me by legacy means.
None of this is worth upsetting the delicate balance of public journalism vs privacy laws as the article alludes to.