Sometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.
I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
We Brits don't speak up enough in general. An e.g. German would have no qualms about going up to the person filming and making their concerns known. That's exactly why it's become normalised
Also many people just flip out even about the most reasonable of requests.
He acknowledges the issue in the article, but doesn’t seem to grasp it fully.
Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
This made me chuckle remembering the time a friend photographed a dog in a bicycle in Berlin and was yelled at by the owner until the photo was deleted. Photographing a pet crossed a big red privacy line. Seems absurd, but I think sensitivity to the phenomenon the author is noting will vary by country.
I was having a similar discussion regarding the Renn faire this weekend. It's silly fun, but it used to be you could dress up as your persona and escape for a while (see also: larping, SCA, or really any number of similar outlets) . However now everything is being recorded, and those recordings act both as unwanted publicity and as a method of cultural mining and extraction
What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.
Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with
Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on? Who's to say how much of you I have in the shot? Do you feature? Did you flash by? Are you blurred? Recognisable?
I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.
I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).
Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.
>I get it, but the alternative is what? Get model release forms from anyone in a public space every time you turn your video camera on?
Only if you publish the video, if there is indentifiable information or when the person is the center piece of your video.
If you are professional company, you have profesional that do this for you.
If you are not professional, you can make the time, because you are not doing it often.
Ask your teammates not to take videos, or find a different group or a different hobby. But since they genuinely enjoy posting the videos, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're probably the one who's going to have move on.
You're entitled to not want videos of you taken in public places showing up online. But you're not entitled to getting that outcome.
Wow, such a nice idea with the purple lanyard it would be great to have something like this in general, walking down the streets someone films you and them or even YT or viewers to scan/flag the videos in question. I guess EU could put forth such regulation - no biggie. Maybe we could also create a framework on existing legislation - design a lanyard, put a QR on it leading to a "I do not consent" site. Advertise it a bit and I'm sure it would be newsworthy, at-least in EU, not sure about the rest of the world.
> Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
This is not clear at all to me.
When you go into public you’re accepting that you might be filmed. The reality is that you are being filmed constantly. It’s just that it bothers you sometimes.
It reminds me of The Light of Other Days (a book about a society where technology makes any privacy impossible). Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
The good news about this is that hardly any normal person would ever watch these Airsoft videos for more than 5 or 10 seconds.
This. Im a dick and straight up demand people exclude me or stop filming. Consumers are ravenous for money making content and have no clue what a media business privacy, consent, and compensation legal framework even remotely look like. As someone who produced a few short documentaries in the early 2000s related to "hobbies", I would have never done so without full consent and compensation...
I wonder if it's a generational or cultural difference present in the comments here.
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
I'm not sure about generational. We take our baby to swimming classes where it is forbidden to take photos or record video — except on the family day. It's always the millennial or boomer parents/grandparents recording stuff and breaking that simple rule.
I think it's a matter of rudeness or carelessness about other people's rights and wellbeing. I want to record this so screw the rules and other babies' privacy.
The classes are pretty mixed, it's Belgium after all. If anything perhaps the next generation is so exposed to TikTok that they might find things less compelling to record? I can't say.
I wish respect and treasuring things without video evidence were on the rise.
Private site. The event site could hold events where cameras are forbidden.
There are other examples like spas or swimming pools where cameras are forbidden.
I think conversation gets more telling if you include some more protected groups like children. And then more slightly more intimate places, like say pools or beaches and expand it to proper zoom and telephoto lenses.
Is there still in those case no expectation of privacy? Where exactly is the line? Maybe changing rooms and toilets are not public places anymore... But is the line really that clear?
> I occasionally see people saying “well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces”.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
In the US the legal doctrine is no privacy at all in public spaces (a lot more expansive than that actually), that's probably where those comments come from.
this is exactly about what is legal or not.
If I remember correctly in Germany there's a distinction about people being the focus of a photograph or people in the background. You can e.g. publish a picture of a public place without asking everybody on that place for their consent.
Another corner case would be filming police brutality. What if the police officers in question wouldn't like to be photographed being brutal!?
Local laws do apply.
I think the laws around this are fairly antiquated. People should clearly have the right to photograph in public, however, I strongly believe that should someone take someone else’s photograph they shouldn’t need their consent to post the photo publicly or monetize it in anyway. Obviously, there should be some limited car outs like public servants in the commission of their duties, legitimate news organizations, use in court etc.
Edit: I don’t think k posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public, but rather anything the general public has access to.
I’m not sure if anyone has missed the delicious irony that airsoft is one of the rare sports where faces and thus identity is covered , pretty much the whole time. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a human face or anything identifiable in ANY airsoft video I’ve ever seen.
So while the author makes an interesting point about surveillance I can’t tell if he’s being ironic on purpose.
I don’t know about the UK, but in the USA the idea of “if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces” is pretty regularly upheld in courts. You don’t have an expectation of privacy in a public space.
You might have some recourse if another person’s video singles you out, but just being one of the several people in an airsoft video, where your face is partially obscured anyway, isn’t much of a legal standing.
> well, if you don’t want to be in photos published online, don’t be in public spaces
That's the correct answer. End of the story.
It is our consensus of what "public space" means and one can do with it (which varies depending on where you are) that forms a lot of our social norms and society. It is why hang drying clothes is acceptable/normal in many parts of the world but not in the US. It is why people are expected to wear at least some clothes. It is why you can take photos of random people, including kids, without their/their parents' consent in the US in public space.
If you think you are so special to never show up in a photo, don't be in the public in the first, or wear a mask, a hat plus sunglasses or something else. Celebrities have been doing this for forever.
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[ 1250 ms ] story [ 2154 ms ] threadSometimes I just want to enjoy a thing with other people enjoying a thing without any expectation that it might end up as "content" to be monetized by the algorithm.
I don't look forward to mass adoption of things like Meta glasses, where even the mundane examples of _going outside_ are all content opportunities waiting to happen.
Also many people just flip out even about the most reasonable of requests.
Public means not private. What you do in public is not private. In presumptive free societies, when in public, one is allowed to notice what others are doing in public. Secret is the opposite of public.
The paranoia around being seen feels a lot like the other reptile-brain based phobias like fear of poisoning with vaccines.
What once was a funny little niche character at the faire is now a TikTok tourist spot.
Where once you could dress up as your pseudo anonymous alter ego with friends and have fun, now you get recorded without consent and get to enjoy all the perks that can come with
Ultimately it will be up to us as a society to determine what is acceptable or how to communicate boundaries for this new element in our culture, with the understanding (to the authors point) that some of us will be against it and others will be enthusiastically for it.
"Running around in the woods, firing small plastic pellets at other people, in pursuit of a contrived-to-be-fun mission, turns out to be, well, fun."
I was wondering if there are no biodegradable bullets for Airsoft and found out that they exist. Maybe a better solution than plastic in the woods.
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
Sorry, that's not clear to me at all. If you're going to accuse other people of "nonsense", you should probably avoid circular reasoning yourself.
I was shooting video of a car park exit last year. (I was trying to prove to the shopping centre owners that it was dangerous.) Mundane footage. Some lady drives out in her car and sees me. Winds the window down and starts on the you don't have the right to film me carry-on.
I politely informed her that, I'm sorry, but I do. She's in public. That's the law (in Australia).
Another fun one, while I'm here. C. 2010, we're shooting a music video in central Melbourne. We're on the public pavement. There's a bank ATM waaaay in the background. Bank security come out. Sorry mate, you can't film here.
We told them, we can. We're on public land. So they call the cops. We politely wait for the cops. The cops turn up.
"This sounded much more interesting on the radio", the cop says. They left us alone to finish the shoot.
Only if you publish the video, if there is indentifiable information or when the person is the center piece of your video.
If you are professional company, you have profesional that do this for you. If you are not professional, you can make the time, because you are not doing it often.
Ask your teammates not to take videos, or find a different group or a different hobby. But since they genuinely enjoy posting the videos, and there's nothing wrong with that, you're probably the one who's going to have move on.
You're entitled to not want videos of you taken in public places showing up online. But you're not entitled to getting that outcome.
This is not clear at all to me.
When you go into public you’re accepting that you might be filmed. The reality is that you are being filmed constantly. It’s just that it bothers you sometimes.
It reminds me of The Light of Other Days (a book about a society where technology makes any privacy impossible). Nearly everybody gets over it really quick and the world moves on.
The good news about this is that hardly any normal person would ever watch these Airsoft videos for more than 5 or 10 seconds.
I am sympathetic to the author, and I also find video a bit invasive of privacy in a way that photos aren't.
I therefore find the (obviously common) attitude that videos are just "something you need to accept" quite alien, but I wonder how much of that attitude is just comments coming from a younger generation that have grown up with the idea that they're recorded all the time.
I'm old enough thankfully to have grown up without video being present, that's probably not true for someone 10 years younger than me.
There's also a big difference in my mind between, "You might be filmed on occassion" and, "A recording of this goes up on youtube every single week".
With the former you can still reasonably anonymous, with the latter you risk becoming a side character in someone elses' parasocial relationship.
I think it's a matter of rudeness or carelessness about other people's rights and wellbeing. I want to record this so screw the rules and other babies' privacy.
The classes are pretty mixed, it's Belgium after all. If anything perhaps the next generation is so exposed to TikTok that they might find things less compelling to record? I can't say.
I wish respect and treasuring things without video evidence were on the rise.
Is there still in those case no expectation of privacy? Where exactly is the line? Maybe changing rooms and toilets are not public places anymore... But is the line really that clear?
> This is nonsense, for a number of reasons. Clearly, one should be able to exist in society, including going outside one’s own home, without needing to accept this kind of thing.
In the US the legal doctrine is no privacy at all in public spaces (a lot more expansive than that actually), that's probably where those comments come from.
Regardless of that, some strangers think it's fine to take pictures of them in public... sometimes they ask first, sometimes they don't.
Edit: I don’t think k posting a photo on a private social media profile / group chat would count as public, but rather anything the general public has access to.
So while the author makes an interesting point about surveillance I can’t tell if he’s being ironic on purpose.
You might have some recourse if another person’s video singles you out, but just being one of the several people in an airsoft video, where your face is partially obscured anyway, isn’t much of a legal standing.
That's the correct answer. End of the story.
It is our consensus of what "public space" means and one can do with it (which varies depending on where you are) that forms a lot of our social norms and society. It is why hang drying clothes is acceptable/normal in many parts of the world but not in the US. It is why people are expected to wear at least some clothes. It is why you can take photos of random people, including kids, without their/their parents' consent in the US in public space.
If you think you are so special to never show up in a photo, don't be in the public in the first, or wear a mask, a hat plus sunglasses or something else. Celebrities have been doing this for forever.