Reading this inspired me that it would be nice if there were a do-not-film-me standard: your mobile phone sends out a do-not-film-me request with a (rotating) hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth. All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Police unions would love for cameras to standardize on that.
There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).
I bet Disney's lawyers can squeeze a lot more money out of municipalities for playing the music publicly in the first place than they can out of random citizens who are uploading to Youtube.
Of course that was the point. But malicious broadcast of copyrighted material to trigger automated enforcement systems sounds pretty far from "fair use" to me. Say nothing of the bad publicity when some video is just so bad it hits the news and now your IP is the soundtrack to a cop beatdown.
When you look at it from a legal "use it or lose it" and corporate risk perspective it's quite surprising that Disney didn't even sent cease and desists.
Edit: Of course you don't lose the copyright but your ability to litigate someone else's unfair use is a lot weaker when their lawyer can trot out a million examples that you were fine with.
It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong or illegal if they know nothing will happen to them. The rule of law is dying because it’s becoming only selectively enforced.
its basically equivalent of them punching you in the face and running away. Yeah you're right and they're wrong, but what would you do about that and your nose is bleeding. Nasty tactics.
There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. It means nothing if you're technically in the legal right: the platforms are risk-averse and don't care about your false positive.
> It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything.
Ahem...
In the UK/EU Let me introduce you to article 22 of the GDPR
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
i.e. If subjected to an algorithm making decisions, you have an automatic right of appeal to a _human_.
Though presumably you would prefer the alternative; that such companies are unrestrained in what they may do and the population at large must simply bend over and grab their ankles with both hands?
Nope, I don't want that at all. What I want is a law with actual enforcement behind it and penalties that actually deter bad actors. You don't just write a law and then stop there declaring job done.
This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.
You’re right. Tech companies will surprise us all and suddenly start obeying the DMCA to the letter instead of just taking the shortcut of “rights holders upload content, it’s fingerprinted, user content that matches fingerprint is taken down”. Then, we’ll link arms and sing kumbaya.
> All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
Rendering security cameras useless for identifying any criminals?
Maybe some of these commenters aren’t old enough to remember when fighting for your right to take photographs and videos in public places was one of the frequent topics in online places like Slashdot and BoingBoing. There have been waves of attempts to restrict freedoms to take photos in many countries. When they pass there’s a significant loss of personal rights and freedoms.
> Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Do you really want this? An off-button for all cameras nearby? Please purchase your official photographs from the gift shop or from the $5 Photo Booth.
This would be a dream for bad people who don’t want to be recorded or photographed doing something, like a bad police officer. Just keep a device around that broadcasts the “do not record at this venue” signal and you can shut down recordings all around.
> All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.
Think about it some more. It's all fun and games, until same technology is used against you. There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this very thing.
There are just two makers of devices, Google and Apple, both proprietary and user hostile and they'll do anything the government tells them. Remember how quickly they implemented that covid tracking bullshit? Yeah.
Not too dissimilar to the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas" where you can block other people in real life. Except in this case it's glasses and in Black Mirror retinal implants. We're getting there.
Yes. And an app could render the same thing on your screen via the same tech currently used to robustly watermark generative AI image output, and now not only you won't be able to screenshot the app, you also won't be able to take a photo of it with another device, and on the off chance you found some pre-202X camera that still could, no other computer would display the resulting photo either.
Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.
To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.
But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...
That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.
And what happens when some bad actor actively monitors for that signal and seeks out the people who have it? And why does it require carrying my surveillance device to tell others I don't want to be surveilled?
Great idea, we could also have a standard in browsers that signals you don't want to be tracked. We could call it the "Do not track" header, short for DNT.
Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list.
Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.
What does that even mean? You have to opt in to film?
If you meant to say "to being filmed", how do you implement that? People have been filming crowds since the 1950s; "Candid Camera" famously made covert filming mainstream.
"Should be" is a dream of the Good Ship Lollipop. Here IRL, laws and regulations are the only thing that will discourage it.
Technical and legal norms are implementation of social norms. “obviously everybody knows that you are supposed to do it that way” doesnt hold up well at court, or during an argument about any decision that costs big bucks.
There already are privacy laws that govern what can be filmed where. Why do we need a standard to pretty please ask some glasshole to respect the law if it's not too much of an inconvenience?
Wasn't there a "standard" that phones in south kora had to make a shutter noise when you took a picture because they had such a huge problem with men doing up the skirt photos of strangers?
Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.
Not sure about the noise, but Japan did something likr it with a constant light when the device was recording. I believe it was combatting the same kind of issues though.
Things happening does not mean it a social norm. It was never acceptable to take underskirt pictures in Japan. They also did not put the onus on women to wear special camera-disabling underwear.
Likewise, it's not acceptable to shove a camera to everyone's face, and it shouldn't be on people to opt-out of it.
It's good to a first-order approximation. Haven't seen many cases where it fails. You do get right-wing parties pretending to be left-wing (never the reverse) though, like the German one that called itself "worker's socialist"
You're getting this wrong. We don't need a standard to signal you don't want your bike to be stolen. The social expectation is that a bike can't be taken.
What the parent comment is suggesting is to invert the onus. "I can film you by default, unless you tell me not to".
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
The lines blur between actively taking photos and passively recording for augmented reality, AI assistance, etc. People might not be aware that they record. This standard would also be useful to extend to robots. For example if you visit friends who have a roomba [1].
Humans adapt and will always break the rules, but that’s not something that can be solved with tech. Think: prohibition vs public anti smoking campaigns/healthcare support/and then increasing prices
If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.
If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.