Grabbing images of women from social media, and aggregating them without their consent, is not necessarily illegal, but it's certainly exploitative and creepy.
The pictures are one thing and bad enough. Including location and links to profiles could make you a party to stalking or worse, and that is quite unethical.
I disagree with this comment, but it's a shame (albeit an unsurprising one) that it's flagged into oblivion instead of responded to. I think the question illuminates something interesting about the incompatibilities between our pre-social-media notions of privacy and our current public posting behavior.
I don't have my beliefs on the topic clearly articulated, but I'll give it a crack. There's the argument that public information is public, and that there's no issue in aggregating it or otherwise making it more accessible, as long as the access is through legitimate means. I'm sympathetic to this and understand why people believe it, but I think it contradicts other consensus moral intuitions about privacy rights. A salient example that other HNers may be familiar with is the doxxing of Scott Alexander; any intellectually honest person familiar with the internet can tell the difference between "you can find out who he is if you do some digging" and "real name published by the NYT", despite the pathetic attempts at dismissing the possibility that doxxing him was bad (amusingly, including by people who I am 100% sure would find the bikini example to be a horrible violation). Hell, I was a reader of Scott's for years before I first came across his real name. The entire social Internet is built on security through obscurity, because opsec is hard and many people aren't constantly vigilant.
There's even precedent for these intuitions outside of the social media context. It's uncontroversially okay for someone's face to show up in your photo taken in public; once you've taken it, nobody cares if you study the guy in the background. However, aggregate and operationalize this, and it changes not just in degree, but in character: It's practically a trope in thrillers for universal CC cameras + alphabet-agency elbow grease to stitch together comprehensive tracking of an individual, and the public is rightfully a little creeped out by the thought.
The main difference here is that technology, as always, is democratizing the ability to do this, pushing the threat model from the unrealistic "NSA spends huge resources to track you" to the prosaic "facial recognition can just track and store everyone's movements at low cost" (or "some under-the-radar shop is aggregating your bikini shots") and a million other mundane violations of our moral intuitions. To my mind, we're in the uncomfortable period before a new norm equilibrium is reached that matches the technological context. This has already happened locally: I'm sure this group knows people who have good opsec since the early 2010s, and "treat everything you post as if it's public" is at this point an age-worn piece of wisdom.
"This is reasonable and illuminates something interesting, but I don't agree with it" is pretty widely considered a poor excuse for downvotes without comment, let alone flagging. You're obviously free to downvote whatever you want, but behaving like that is explicitly making this a meaner, dumber, less interesting place.
I should have quoted only the latter part of your sentence. I disagree that it's an illuminating comment or that the reasoning behind it is strong. And in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral" (you can question whether we have the same definition for "reasonable", but at some point you'll have to recognise that we all make some decision at some point as to what we consider reasonable or not).
That said, I didn't actually downvote it, I just gave some argument for why I think the downvote was justified.
> in particular, "I disagree with it" is not in the same category as "most reasonable people consider this to be immoral"
IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history. If you want to hide[1] a potentially sincere groupthink simply because it doesn't comport with groupthink, there a million and one fora full of dumb, narrow-minded people you can do that on. HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide.
This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss, but this is demonstrably untrue of the parent comment, as evidenced by my response to it and the half dozen people who found it interesting enough to upvote it.
[1] Again, we're talking about flagging, not just downvoting, though it applies weakly to the latter too.
I agree that the flagging goes a bit too far. The downvote is entirely justified though. Downvoting for disagreement is explicitly allowed as per the site guidelines. Now myself I try not to overuse that, but if I really believe that I can't follow or agree with the reasoning behind something at all and I find it somehow disturbing, yeah, then there's nothing wrong with downvoting.
> IMO, this distinction is usually illusory, and only taken seriously in the kinds of conversational spaces that aren't worth being part of. "Most reasonable people think it's immoral" can be applied to any number of horrific things over the course of human history.
Your solution to the fallibility of human judgment, especially when it comes to ethics, is to assume that there can be no moral judgement anymore, because one might be wrong. I don't think this is productive. I'm quite sure there are a number of things you would consider deeply immoral that you would be shocked to read here. People are allowed to have a sense of ethics and to use that to guide downvotes. If you disagree, just upvote instead, or discuss why you disagree. But you yourself admitted that most people would find the behaviour in question immoral.
> HN isn't all the way there yet, and I think it's worth pushing back against the tide.
Your mistake is to assume that HN is somehow above basic human nature. But HN is also full of explicit and implicit biases and those can often hide behind a veneer of supposed rationality.
> This doesn't suggest that it's impossible to post something so alien that there's likely little of value to discuss
I found your contribution to the debate to be actually sort of interesting, but more as an answer to a question such as "how can we explain why we find that sort of behaviour to be immoral" and not to the OP's implicit "I fail to see what's immoral here".
Also, it was just in a sense a low-effort comment. I'm sure that poster can perfectly well understand why someone would find the behaviour in question immoral given that that person presumably has spent time around other people, including women who might object to this kind of objectification. So if they still disagree that it is immoral, they could at least try to argue why.
(Also, the sole reason why I'm engaging you, as opposed to OP, here is because I find these sorts of meta-ethics / meta-rationality discussions to be quite interesting and important in a world where "reasonable people" seem to be less and less able to agree on how to ascertain both what is true and what is moral. This is, I think, a discussion worth having, I just happen to disagree with your conclusions.)
If you have to say "I'm not trying to be mean" before anyone accuses you of it, then you're clearly aware that what you're saying sounds mean, but you don't care to try and avoid it, but you want to pretend you are still nice. Which, ironically, is something that would cause some intensive pencil scritching during a psych eval.