Reading into the details of these kinds of "privacy implications" (particularly the desire to force publication delay and the force blurring of people or license plates), I'm left thinking that the "implications" are more stark for freedom than they are for privacy.
Are there really privacy implications of any sort in publishing a series of photos of people and cars on a street that aren't already implicated by the knowledge that Google and / or the NSA already have far better photos of the same scenes?
On a more fundamental level: isn't publishing, in real time and high quality, a photo (or series of photos) of a public area essentially for freedom of the press? And doesn't the insertion of a "privacy" claim that threaten that freedom?
I know it's specifically enshrined in the US Constitution, but in an age of ubiquitous cameras and publication media, it's equally important in Australia and around the world, no?
We can opt either to allow each other to share our eyes and ears unto infinity, putting criminals and power brokers on notice that their actions in public are preserved for all time, or we can decide to close and cover them, leaving only criminals and power brokers to see and hear.
It's certainly not an easy issue, but it's important to remember that privacy isn't a black and white issue either.
There is a difference between one photograph of one place at one time and a systematic collection of photographs of many places or over an extended period of time.
There is a difference between a single photograph taken by a private individual for their own use and a photograph taken by a powerful organisation to go into a large database of similar photographs.
There is a difference between a photograph taken for personal or in-house use and a photograph that will be shared with others or openly republished for anyone to see.
In all of these cases, the photograph itself may be the same, but the implications for privacy/anonymity are quite different. Once you start running computer vision algorithms on the photograph and correlating the results with other data sources, the implications go much further still.
Everyone compromises--it's just that Europe tends to err on the side of privacy, whereas the US usually errs on the side of freedom. From my American point of view though, Europe seems a lot more eager to "export" its preferences abroad through legal means.
I was a bit too broad--by "Europe" I meant France, as when French courts tried to apply the Right to be Forgotten principle to information about French citizens that was stored outside of Europe.
And that's worked great, with Merkel prosecuting a comedian for insulting Ergodan or Germany engaging in the political imprisonment of non-violent radicals.
While there are many problems with the USA, its legal protections of e.g. freedom of expression are vastly superior to those found in European nations.
With most things, I agree, but I'm not sure I see any middle ground here. Can you publish a picture taken in public, even if it includes faces and license plates, or not? This does seem binary to me.
Big public projects can have policies which minimise negative externalities.
You can still privately publish any photo you like, within the bounds of the law.
There is lots of middle ground. "Legally you can, but morally, should you?"
Time series get interesting.
If it comes to actual law and courts, it's definitely context dependent. Intent matters a lot. Surf cam is more OK than "revenge cam" of ex's house. Yes that means humans ascribe morality to certain arrangements of bits (and how the bits are evaluated is affected by who they were created by, and why). No, publishing and freedom of speech are not absolute but depend on purpose and intent.
To put it another way, technically child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?
> child pornography is just a time series of pictures right?
But presumably it's not the capturing of the photons that is criminal in the case of child pornography. Even if you used a fake camera, it's still illegal, right?
Why does that have to be binary and can not depend on the circumstances? There are conflicting interests and rights. Invoking one violates others, so a balance has to be found. A blanket yes/no is either banning something because it could violate some other right, or allowing senseless violation of some right just because there are situations where that could be justified.
Rights are weighted against each other all the time, why should e.g. freedom of press be any different in this case?
Re your elites argument, right now "normal people" are generally awarded more protections than important figures, although the latter have more resources available to try nevertheless. They'll still have those resources, and normal people still won't have them, if you remove protections.
1) It is naive, at best, to believe that the wholesale destruction of privacy for individuals will also mean the wholesale destruction of privacy for elites. This simply won't happen.
2) Privacy is not a binary state. The crux of your argument is that since I do not have privacy from the NSA, then I should not have privacy from any individuals. I don't mind if you want to give up yours, but I like mine. Please do not subject me to your tyranny.
3) Your Constitutional hand-wringing ignores a lot of reality, including (but not limited to) the fact that Constitutional law isn't as simple as you think it is, and that if your best argument is that people who never conceived of mass photography and image recognition didn't take a stand against it, well... that's silly.
4) Your conclusions are precisely backwards. If we start making the locations of all cars perfectly public, of all people public etc, we won't have more freedom. We'll have an inescapable tyranny.
This is not an easy problem to solve. But your proposed solution is only fine for people whose actions are neatly aligned with current and future cultural norms as well as the preferences of current and future elites. Cheap widespread surveillance (which will happen otherwise) will be absolutely devastating to enemies of the state, it will be horrible for "unusual" people generally, and it will be FANTASTIC for elites.
The US constitution doesn't say much about privacy.
The 4th amendment restricts the government from doing things that would (in part) violate privacy of individuals, but it doesn't say much about what other citizens can do in public places.
You're right about the Consitution. However, the law isn't restricted to the Legislative Branch. Case law is law too, and the courts have ruled repeatedly that you have no expectation of privacy in public.
My impression based on the title of the blog site and the domain is that the author is in Australia. That doesn't change anything about who has and does not have access to original images. However, it does provide a different context for legal analysis.
The lack of quality blurring is definitely something to prioritize.
As an aside, OpenStreetView makes me think of the "gargoyles" in Snow Crash. As sensors of all types (but in this instance cameras) get radically cheaper & start to permeate the physical world it's inevitable that things visible from the street will just become less private over time.
And quality blurring may be tricky to implement.
On Google Street View, street name plates and road signs are often blurred, because the algorithm is not sure if they are licence plates or not, and blurs too much. For Open Street View, this would defeat the purpose of having the photos.
"Because it's hard" is not a very good reason to neglect doing something when you know it's the right thing to do.
The right thing to do would have been to avoid publishing these photos until you have the means to anonymise them properly, or to use a service like Google Vision and pay the small fee to get someone else to do it.
OpenStreetView isn't intended to intrude, it is just naivety on the creators part. It will be solved in some capacity sooner or later, if not for genuine concern for peoples privacy, to avoid negative media attention.
Shouldn't it be possible to let people do their own blurring for the case where the automatic stuff doesn't work?
There isn't going to be that much to blur if this is all straight ahead views from a car. You don't see many people on the road from lower than car roof level. Those on the sidewalks will be pretty far away. The issue with Google is that the point of view is deliberately made high enough to clear cars in other lanes. So in practice the privacy thing might not a huge issue here unless a significant number of people start mounting cameras on poles.
Perhaps we could consider what is going on here to be something of a small-townification of cities.
I grew up in a small town. If something was going on out from behind closed doors, everyone knew about it. And sometimes they knew even if it was behind closed doors.
Prior to the current era of data ubiquity, to escape such a thing, you could find some level of anonymity in a crowd. Walking through Times Square in NYC, you're technically in public, but you're just another unremarkable person on an unremarkable day.
There is a certain level of ignorance about the greater world in a small town. I've witnessed people saying and doing very--how should I say--unprogressive things, "just" because they didn't know any better [0]. On the flip side, there is a certain level of indifference about the greater world in a city. I've seen no greater degree of true open-mindedness in cities, and I think that's due to a kind of shutting down and retreating from the full ocean of people that cities contain.
In other words, whether or not a certain person lives a public-by-default or private-by-default life, they're probably going to be exactly the same.
So what does this mean for privacy? Privacy is a continuum that is inversely correlated with how much contact you want to have with the outside world. 100% privacy requires 100% retreat from the world, which is childishly unrealistic. Either accept that society needs to know your face to be able to talk to you, or go move out into the desert and live a hermit's life. You can't expect to live in a community and be "anonymous", not now, not ever before.
I don't agree that one should be allowed to blur themselves out of other people's photos. If you're out in public, you agree to be seen. It's childish to say, "I don't want my photo online." You might as well say, "I don't want people on the bus to see my face." They are the same exact people online as they are on the bus.
[0] They should have known better, ignorance is no excuse here, but it's very easy to rationalize to yourself that the media provides an accurate depiction of people-unlike-you of whom you have no personal experience. I'm not sure my grandfather has ever met an African American man who confirms his racist stereotyping of them, but that doesn't stop him from adopting whole-cloth the image that they are all wanna-be rap stars, which I blame mostly on my grandfather being a raging asshole, but a small part on mainstream media providing black men with few other roles.
True. Seen and enshrined in some (or more) peoples fleeting memory. Not captured for (nearly) all eternity and the whole world (who were not present at that exact moment and place) to see.
That is also the reason I oppose ubiquitous public surveillance. Even if it can only be seen by some amount of government actors.
I am glad, that I grew up in a time without constant photography or trackability. I am glad, that I an not totally recorded with every step I take in public and that only the people who walk by might have the chance to remember my face and me being there at that moment.
That's not entirely true. Photographers have long had very broad rights about shooting in public [0]. If you're in a high-traffic area, it's fairly likely you could end up in someone's photo. You might be lost in the sea of people, but you'll probably also be lost in the sea of mass data collection.
My point is not that "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear". There is perhaps a corollary, "just who do you think you are that anyone would be interested in your life?" But even that is beside the point. The point is that you've never actually had this extremely broad version of a right to privacy that you think you had.
I know of the rights a photographer has (at least here in Germany). It is not so clear cut as it sounds. for example, if I wear a big pink hat in a sea of suits and a photographer does make a photo of me within this sea, even being among maybe hundreds of people, I am clearly the center of attention and he has to obtain the right to use (and show) the image in any way.
You are right, if me being merely some pebble in a sea of pebbles - so to speak.
So there is still some privacy implication left - even in your example.
>In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner.
More like some accept this grudgingly, as, until recently, with the near-ubiquity of delivery services, there were, for many, simply no choice: Stay at home, unseen, and starve, or venture out for groceries, et al.
Public space serves at least two distinct purposes that we conflate at risk to both privacy and freedom: transit and public life. Not all who need the former want the latter, but our physical world does not permit them to have one without the other.
How do you actually use openstreetview.org? All I could see was a map, no imagery. At first some roads were highlighted in pink but as soon as I zoomed and panned a little bit, the pink lines disappeared...
Funny, me and a friend started talking about a crowd sourced alternative to Google Street View just last week. My first thought when discussing this was: how will you normalize data? How will you provide a 360 view? I guess the answer is: you probably wont.
Didn't know of this initiative, so I was happy to see people working on it. Here's the first image that popped up for me:
Are there really privacy implications of any sort in publishing a series of photos of people and cars on a street that aren't already implicated by the knowledge that Google and / or the NSA already have far better photos of the same scenes?
On a more fundamental level: isn't publishing, in real time and high quality, a photo (or series of photos) of a public area essentially for freedom of the press? And doesn't the insertion of a "privacy" claim that threaten that freedom?
I know it's specifically enshrined in the US Constitution, but in an age of ubiquitous cameras and publication media, it's equally important in Australia and around the world, no?
We can opt either to allow each other to share our eyes and ears unto infinity, putting criminals and power brokers on notice that their actions in public are preserved for all time, or we can decide to close and cover them, leaving only criminals and power brokers to see and hear.