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by livueta 1381 days ago
Well, consider the grandparent's example:

> Note that european style privacy law is differentiated in the finer details: a person who films at a nude beach can claim to do so as a technological extension of their own personal memories and with no intention to publish the material and that is not in violation of privacy laws.

This would be reasonably clear-cut if images were being published on a professional pornography site or whatever, but what happens when the voyeur changes their mind and sends a pic to a friend who never re-shares it?

There are two possibilities here: either the law is unenforceable in cases like these and acts more like a security blanket than any sort of protection to be relied upon, baiting people into a false sense of privacy where they're open for exploitation by creeps - or you've got mandatory on-device image scanning / no E2E / etc, as compromising private communications is required in cases where the material would never hit public services.

Btw, I don't even really see this as a US vs. EU philosophy-of-law thing - the US has plenty of dumb unenforceable laws that do more harm than good as well, but imo does at least get the privacy in public issue roughly correct.

e: downthread, this is at least anecdotally a problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32673402

My uncharitable take is that this is the result of this style of privacy protection's unenforceability problems. If it works so well, why the decline in participation / increase in electronic voyeurism?

2 comments

i do not agree with the idea that every human right and corresponding laws that are not perfectly and fully enforcable under all circumstances must either lead to an ever increasing trend towards a surveillance state, or be dropped entirely. Both of those are terrible choices. Almost all human rights have some edge case were lack of discoverability prevents enforcement of the laws and prosecution of severe violations. Even murder cases go cold. Does not mean it should be legal.
That’s quite a bit of a slippery slope you’ve got there. Intent matters a ton in law. It’s the difference between man-slaughter and murder. It’s the difference between negligence and property damage. Why can’t it also be the difference between recording memories and publishing without consent?