[haskellshill]

Sorry, but why even care about this? Is it an invasion of your privacy if strangers see you walking down the street? If no, how is strangers seeing you walking down the street in the background of some youtube video a privacy violation??

[tavavex]

It's the same reason why people are okay being carded, but not okay with submitting their ID digitally to be recorded and retained forever.

Meeting people in public has an obvious, logical bound. Being recorded does not. When you pass by someone in public, you're one of a thousand - passers-by see you once and then never again, they don't permanently remember you or what you did, no one but the people who know you care in the slightest.

When you get recorded, the data now exists forever, backed up in several places and basically impossible to get rid of. Most importantly, you can't ever know what will happen to this data in the future once it's there. Unlike meeting people in public, the internet doesn't forget. If in 20 years, someone puts up a service that let people upload a picture of your face and have it return a dossier with every bit of video you've ever appeared in, you have no recourse or say in the matter. It's "public data" after all, right? Basically equivalent to just being in the public!

[haskellshill]

> no one but the people who know you care in the slightest

> someone puts up a service that let people upload a picture of your face and have it return a dossier with every bit of video you've ever appeared in

Okay and why exactly would anybody be interested in that? Sounds like a pointless hypothetical

[tavavex]

> Okay and why exactly would anybody be interested in that? Sounds like a pointless hypothetical

"Okay, so this new attack vector that hasn't existed before will appear, but maybe no one will ever want to use it" isn't a great argument.

I'm not sure how to explain it better that total aggregation of all data that's ever existed on you into one convenient blob is dangerous. Even answering your direct question is trivial: imagine that you break up with someone and they use your public data to stalk you. Or you have a conflict with your relatives, who can then use that data to see where you might be and what you might be up to.

But the obvious further implications of systems like those are second-, third-, fourth-order processing. So, we live in a society where you can look people up by their photos. Up next, the videos they appeared in will be location-tagged, with other services putting two and two together and selling everyone's location data, just put a photo in and you get a convenient timeline. Other services may sell information on what people and groups you were seen associating with. These are all very convenient things to offer - now, police investigations go a lot easier, breaking up inconvenient groups is less troublesome, employers and landlords can screen you for 'undesirable' qualities before ever seeing you. Lots of possibilities, lots of people who would love to use that.