This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video, but I can't justify that feeling. There's something so wonderfully disobedient about neutralizing cameras with lasers that I'm tempted to ask: is this legal? Does the potential for damaging the camera carry any liability?
Lastly, just because you could use lasers to neutralize cameras doesn't mean you can. In trying to to make a point about the ubiquity of cameras, the author reveals a challenge in fighting them:
> Video cameras the size of postage stamps can be procured for under $100, and will certainly become even smaller and cheaper.
Blocking cameras is one thing; finding them is another!
This would be kind of impractical. It might work with older cameras, especially in indoor scenes. But modern cctv cameras have pretty good WDR (wide dynamic range) by default, and you'd likely find that your face gets better exposure than you think. It some cases, especially indoors, this hat could actually HELP the camera if the light from it bounces off nearby walls and then illuminates your face.
Not to mention the battery pack and heat generation issues from such a hat would make it rather cumbersome to wear anyway.
>This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video
This idea is shifting though, we've steadily been leaving behind a place of having cameras predominantly being used to prevent theft, towards a situation of mass government surveillance on the street level (think license plate scanners etc). To me personally, that is more offensive at this point.
> This feels much more offensive than the act of capturing video
On this note I've been thinking about whether there's anything actually offensive about capturing video in a public location. You're just capturing photons thrown at you. If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).
The human eye is a camera; the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition. One is made of organic material, another made of silicon and glass. In the future, I see this boundary blurring, whether in the form of digital prosthetic eyes for the blind (which inevitably would possess the hardware ability to capture video to a file) or in being able to understand, capture, and save neural signals out of our biological eyes directly. It will happen and is just a matter of time. So we might as well create a unified ethical framework now, built around the fact that the human eye is a camera; the act of seeing is videography; the act of remembering is data storage.
Privacy is conceptually incompatible with public places.
If one doesn't want that the fact they've been at some public location, doing something, they shouldn't be there. Forcing bystanding observers to not remember or not disclose the facts they have observed is somewhat odd idea.
My point is, this difference/gap may be closed in the future by technology, so inaccuracy of eyewitness memory shouldn't be used as a basis for ethical justification.
Today, yes. Today recording means we're still taking a camera and do some actions.
But love it or hate it, but it seems that we're grasping wearable computing. And that includes stuff like hearing, vision, memory or navigational aids, and such things depend on recording what's going on around the wearer. So, while today there's a clear distinction we're just bound to hit the issue some years in the future. And given that some tech is already there, said future doesn't seem to be too far away. Then the difference would be much smaller. Probably even non-existent if we'd get anywhere close to what transhumanistic sci-fi pictures ;)
And this means a war between concepts - freedom to absorb and process information, and freedom to control your personal information.
I'm not sure there is any objective approach for ethical problems, so, I guess, it would be just a matter of taste, chance and circumstances.
It is unreasonable to expect to not be observed in a public place, but it is reasonable to expect to not be recorded artificially without your knowledge. This goes for all locations, including public ones.
No, it's not. You've probably been photographed or filmed at least once on your way to work today by an innocent tourist or citizen who was shooting something. A building, or a friend perhaps. It seems unreasonable to expect you won't be featured on such photos.
Yes, it is. I can observe innocent tourists and citizens taking photos and avoid them if I want to. The key part you missed was "without my knowledge." I'm not going to obsess over being in the background of the occasional tourist photo, but if I want to avoid it, I can by simply observing the obvious camera and avoiding it. I could even discuss it with them if I really cared for some reason, and possibly have them delete a photo of me.
I am aware of tourist photos and photos by friends. It is reasonable to expect that I'll be in occasional photographs where I am not the subject. I know that. It is reasonable to expect that I won't be the subject of photos without my knowledge or included in detailed photographic records just because I went to a public place. Detailed imagery of your whereabouts and activities should never be expected and should only be legal with a warrant.
There is a conceptual difference between granting permission for everyone who sees you at a time to see you and know you were somewhere and granting permission for everyone in a place to make images of you and share them with everyone else in the world for all time.
I think that this is especially pertinent for children who are not able to make the decision to grant these rights, the permission for a photograph or video cannot be rescinded on majority, but the person could make different decisions about where they go, what they wear and how they behave, with limited responsibility for the prior decision to do something else.
As a thought experiment, imagine three masks. The first is matte black, with 0% specular and 0% diffuse reflection. The second has a mirror finish, with 100% specular reflection. The third glows, as an omnidirectional light source.
Would it be acceptable for a person in public to wear one of these, but not one of the others?
My sense is that if you want privacy in public, you should wear the matte black mask.
> the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition
There's a huge difference: With a camera, you can record the photons and share them. The barrier to entry for privacy violation and harassment has via "captured photons" has never been lower.
This comment reminds me super strongly of the Black Mirror episode on humans having memory recording devices turning their every experience into a recorded session to be replayed and analysed at will.
It's very well done and wonderfully dystopic. Soon™
I remember that episode; Black Mirror is a really good, thought-provoking series. As for this particular case, I believe we'll simply adapt. You could weave a pretty much identical dystopia 20 years ago about smartphones of today, but it turns out we're fine, and we're enriched as a society (despite what the anti-technology whiners will tell you).
> The human eye is a camera; the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition.
I think that another important difference is that Canon-recorded images can be stored, archived, and consulted indefinitely, and by anyone, whereas human-recorded images cannot.
My point is, this difference/gap may be closed in the future by technology, so inaccuracy of eyewitness memory shouldn't be used as a basis for ethical justification. In 50 years we may be able to store images from the human eye, and/or use prosthetic eyes that fix blindness and serve both biological and digital functions at the same time.
If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).
That would be a perfectly reasonable position if there weren't laws against blocking photons. (Mask bans)
> If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).
That is true when it comes to merely being seen, but not being recorded. Being in a public location naturally implies consent to be seen, but it does not imply consent to be recorded artificially. (This includes any augmentations to human abilities from future technology, as someone mentioned this in a later comment)
That would only work for cameras in B/W or "night" mode.
Most decent security cameras have a movable IR filter. In color mode, this IR filter is moved into the light path to filter out infrared light. IR light causes a purplish tinge to color video, and the easiest approach is to reduce the IR light hitting the sensor.
In night mode, the camera drops the color processing and just yields a B/W image. In this case, the IR cut filter is moved out of the light path, allowing the ambient IR light to hit the sensor and provide more exposure ability than you would get from just the visible spectrum IR light.
I think people here will be really interested to know that this is an active technique in the "quantum hacking" world as well. As you probably know, quantum mechanics very often offers 100% security about creating shared keys which nobody else knows -- but there is a very active physics subfield called "quantum hacking" which says "well, but you're assuming that your device perfectly embodies these equations and the reality is it doesn't, so let's see what happens if we drive up the parameters to a non-ideal regime, can we run a Man-in-the-Middle attack then without you both knowing about it?"
Here's for example a pop-science article about using camera zapping on Vice Motherboard:
The solution to this was to include a filter which prevented oversaturation at the target wavelengths, but it turns out you could just blast it with some other wavelengths...
Yes he did - although I never heard of him turning it on.
Also the photo in that article is of Pelorus which he sold quite a long time ago - I guess in 2009 Eclipse was still being built in Germany so they couldnt get a picture
> not a single instance of permanent eye damage from laser pointers has been recorded anywhere
The study referenced is from 2000, before the time when high-power lasers were available on the internet. There's a study here which states that green lasers can cause lasting retinal damage [0]. As much as I want a sweet laser I'd probably zap myself playing around with it.
Please be VERY wary of "legal class IIIa" laser pointers purchased in the US.
A few years ago, ICE and the FDA started cracking down on the importation of high-powered laser pointers. Instead of fixing the problem, it meant that every single imported laser is marked "Class IIIa" regardless of its actual output power, since the border agents rarely (if ever) test the actual output of the devices.
I had a friend test a green laser pointer purchased online in 2010 with a "<5mW" warning label on it using a ThorLabs optical power meter. It measured 41mW. A basic diffraction grating test also revealed a massive amount of dangerous IR leakage.
That's an interesting question actually. My guess, and I hate to guess, is that laws state the a license plate needs to be readable but most likely don't say that have to be able to be read by a camera since the laws were written before those were commmonplace and most likely have not been adopted as technology has changed.
Many states have pretty broad laws in this regard. For example in Minnesota the relevant law reads:
"The person driving the motor vehicle shall keep the plate legible and unobstructed and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so that the lettering is plainly visible at all times. It is unlawful to cover any assigned letters and numbers or the name of the state of origin of a license plate with any material whatever, including any clear or colorless material that affects the plate's visibility or reflectivity."
Once while messing with a laser pointer, my brother and I pointed it at a camera in the entry to the grocery store with a monitor up. The monitor immediately went to snow which was quite unexpected for us. We switched the laser pointer off and the screen came back.
This is quite different than the effect noted here, assumedly the sensor observed a signal out of range and passed that downstream.
I have also heard of people getting permanent banding on their point and shoot sensors from sun-focused time lapses [0]. So my question becomes, while this may be interesting from a privacy perspective, to be able to stop cameras from being able to see you temporarily, what is the potential to permanently damage a camera?
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadLastly, just because you could use lasers to neutralize cameras doesn't mean you can. In trying to to make a point about the ubiquity of cameras, the author reveals a challenge in fighting them:
> Video cameras the size of postage stamps can be procured for under $100, and will certainly become even smaller and cheaper.
Blocking cameras is one thing; finding them is another!
Not to mention the battery pack and heat generation issues from such a hat would make it rather cumbersome to wear anyway.
Until you walk into that elevator with a mirror mounted inside.
Or until you bump into other people.
It would do nothing to stop your image being recorded. It may well just improve the quality of your image on the recording.
This idea is shifting though, we've steadily been leaving behind a place of having cameras predominantly being used to prevent theft, towards a situation of mass government surveillance on the street level (think license plate scanners etc). To me personally, that is more offensive at this point.
On this note I've been thinking about whether there's anything actually offensive about capturing video in a public location. You're just capturing photons thrown at you. If someone doesn't want to be captured, too bad, they shouldn't be throwing photons at you (read: if they want privacy, they shouldn't be in a public location).
The human eye is a camera; the only real difference between your eye and your Canon is in material composition. One is made of organic material, another made of silicon and glass. In the future, I see this boundary blurring, whether in the form of digital prosthetic eyes for the blind (which inevitably would possess the hardware ability to capture video to a file) or in being able to understand, capture, and save neural signals out of our biological eyes directly. It will happen and is just a matter of time. So we might as well create a unified ethical framework now, built around the fact that the human eye is a camera; the act of seeing is videography; the act of remembering is data storage.
I beg your pardon?
If one doesn't want that the fact they've been at some public location, doing something, they shouldn't be there. Forcing bystanding observers to not remember or not disclose the facts they have observed is somewhat odd idea.
But love it or hate it, but it seems that we're grasping wearable computing. And that includes stuff like hearing, vision, memory or navigational aids, and such things depend on recording what's going on around the wearer. So, while today there's a clear distinction we're just bound to hit the issue some years in the future. And given that some tech is already there, said future doesn't seem to be too far away. Then the difference would be much smaller. Probably even non-existent if we'd get anywhere close to what transhumanistic sci-fi pictures ;)
And this means a war between concepts - freedom to absorb and process information, and freedom to control your personal information.
I'm not sure there is any objective approach for ethical problems, so, I guess, it would be just a matter of taste, chance and circumstances.
I am aware of tourist photos and photos by friends. It is reasonable to expect that I'll be in occasional photographs where I am not the subject. I know that. It is reasonable to expect that I won't be the subject of photos without my knowledge or included in detailed photographic records just because I went to a public place. Detailed imagery of your whereabouts and activities should never be expected and should only be legal with a warrant.
I think that this is especially pertinent for children who are not able to make the decision to grant these rights, the permission for a photograph or video cannot be rescinded on majority, but the person could make different decisions about where they go, what they wear and how they behave, with limited responsibility for the prior decision to do something else.
Would it be acceptable for a person in public to wear one of these, but not one of the others?
My sense is that if you want privacy in public, you should wear the matte black mask.
There's a huge difference: With a camera, you can record the photons and share them. The barrier to entry for privacy violation and harassment has via "captured photons" has never been lower.
It's very well done and wonderfully dystopic. Soon™
I think that another important difference is that Canon-recorded images can be stored, archived, and consulted indefinitely, and by anyone, whereas human-recorded images cannot.
That would be a perfectly reasonable position if there weren't laws against blocking photons. (Mask bans)
That is true when it comes to merely being seen, but not being recorded. Being in a public location naturally implies consent to be seen, but it does not imply consent to be recorded artificially. (This includes any augmentations to human abilities from future technology, as someone mentioned this in a later comment)
http://hackedgadgets.com/2008/02/21/ir-leds-used-to-defeat-s...
Not as noticeable to bystanders. Much more passive approach that can be maintained for as long as necessary.
Not as likely to get the police called on you.
Combining the two approaches could work http://www.digikey.com/catalog/en/partgroup/ir-laser-module/...
In night mode, the camera drops the color processing and just yields a B/W image. In this case, the IR cut filter is moved out of the light path, allowing the ambient IR light to hit the sensor and provide more exposure ability than you would get from just the visible spectrum IR light.
> Not as noticeable to bystanders. Much more passive approach that can be maintained for as long as necessary.
> Not as likely to get the police called on you.
Here's for example a pop-science article about using camera zapping on Vice Motherboard:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-new-quantum-hack-just-bur...
The solution to this was to include a filter which prevented oversaturation at the target wavelengths, but it turns out you could just blast it with some other wavelengths...
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/530181/the-next-battleg...
So it's a really fun-looking discipline, lots of groups hiring postdocs for it etc.
This guy is really good. Some of the links here might be informative http://www.vad1.com/lab/
I am happy to answer any questions you might have.
I don't have time to learn about this now, unfortunately, but I'll put these resources on my list. Thanks for the reply!
The study referenced is from 2000, before the time when high-power lasers were available on the internet. There's a study here which states that green lasers can cause lasting retinal damage [0]. As much as I want a sweet laser I'd probably zap myself playing around with it.
[0] http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c2982.full
Anything sold legally in the US as a "laser pointer" is going to be class IIIa.
A few years ago, ICE and the FDA started cracking down on the importation of high-powered laser pointers. Instead of fixing the problem, it meant that every single imported laser is marked "Class IIIa" regardless of its actual output power, since the border agents rarely (if ever) test the actual output of the devices.
I had a friend test a green laser pointer purchased online in 2010 with a "<5mW" warning label on it using a ThorLabs optical power meter. It measured 41mW. A basic diffraction grating test also revealed a massive amount of dangerous IR leakage.
"The person driving the motor vehicle shall keep the plate legible and unobstructed and free from grease, dust, or other blurring material so that the lettering is plainly visible at all times. It is unlawful to cover any assigned letters and numbers or the name of the state of origin of a license plate with any material whatever, including any clear or colorless material that affects the plate's visibility or reflectivity."
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T0j5azGVmw
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzyKLoEDb64
This is quite different than the effect noted here, assumedly the sensor observed a signal out of range and passed that downstream.
I have also heard of people getting permanent banding on their point and shoot sensors from sun-focused time lapses [0]. So my question becomes, while this may be interesting from a privacy perspective, to be able to stop cameras from being able to see you temporarily, what is the potential to permanently damage a camera?
[0] http://www.nikonians.org/forums/dcboard.php?potential-ccd-im...