It's one thing to enforce contracts but another for government to dictate how private platforms monetize their own property. If ads make the service worse, the answer is competition and exit, not government bans. No one is forcing you to use these platforms.
That argument ignores the reality of the current market structure. The "competition and exit" theory only works when valid alternatives actually exist.
Right now, we are dealing with effective monopolies and duopolies. You can't just exit the App Store if you have an iPhone, and Amazon has cornered the market so hard that switching isn't really an option for most people. When competition is dead, the market can't self-correct because consumers have nowhere else to go.
Also, "monetizing their own property" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your take. These platforms already charge: transaction fees, commissions, listing fees, higher product prices baked in, and in many cases consumers are paying directly (Prime, app purchases, ride fares). Injecting ads is basically double charging. On top of that it shifts the platform from "help me find the best match" to "whoever pays the platform wins".
Honestly, unless you are in a C-suite role, I'm not sure why you would defend a model that actively works against you as a consumer.
The laws for this were written when "public photography" was someone with a film camera. It was maybe valid in the digital camera era.
But now I can point a camera at a crowd and It will:
- count the number of people and animals there
- give me an estimated gender for each
- analyse the sentiment of each person
- save their facial features so I can find "Male-sg76fg" in future photos automatically
- store the GPS location
All this with consumer gear I can carry with me, no government level spy gadgets needed. All live at 2-20fps depending on how much hardware I throw at it.
With some extra work I can then find each of them on social media, grab their real names and other information from public sources and now I have a surveillance database. (Illegal where I live, but who's gonna check?)
This makes "public photography" a whole different thing from what it used to be.
If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village.
> Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it?
That is a strange dichotomy, "government vs everyone". You miss the much more important large private organizations.
Government can at least be held accountable, if voters are willing. What the private orgs do you don't even have a chance to know about without a (tragic doomed person) whistleblower. Even the "evil" government actions heavily uses those unaccountable private entities for much of the dirty work.
Also "everyone" is useless. What use is any of it to individuals? Weapons or information. The fight is among deep complex organizations. Individuals - unless part of some network - may as well not exist. The individual with a firearm as a protection against government comes to mind, even in groups they'll be blown away anytime the organized large groups even sneeze towards them.
Another example is who uses the law: Any large company or even the government is much much MUCH more effective, no matter how much an individual has law on their side, at least when the large organization is willing to drag out the fight until the individual or small group runs out of resources.
If you want to achieve something, ORGANIZE! Otherwise you just throw yourself into the grinder, at best even providing reasons and justification to the other side.
Totally agreed. Even if that network is as simple as posting something to social media and watching it go viral, it's still a network.
I thought about breaking commerical interests out separately in my post, but didn't want to overcomplicate. An example would be the V888 form in the UK, which allows you to request the details of the licenced keeper of a vehicle, as long as you can show "reasonable cause". The reasonable causes are, of course, mostly commercial.
> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.
IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.
Yes. There’s also something about the sheer volume of recorded media & ease of distribution which feels like we crossed a qualitatively different threshold. The laws around photography were set in an era when it cost money to take a photograph, the cameras were easier to notice and slower, and when someone took a photo it was highly unlikely that they’d share it widely. Now it’s basically impossible to avoid cameras, people take far more pictures than they used to, and anyone’s photos can reach large audiences and often easily linked back to you. There was nothing like the way random people could see someone having a bad day, post it, and half an hour later a million strangers have seen it - a newspaper or TV station could do that, but their staffers usually ignored things which didn’t have a legitimate news interest.
This feels kind of like the way you could avoid having extensive traffic laws & control systems in 1905 when only a few people had cars.
Private persons snapping a few shots here and there in public capturing someone’s likeness is a drop in the bucket compared to all the automated surveillance photography and video out there. Let’s address that first so we are not straining out gnats but swallowing camels.
It shouldn't, you wouldn't be able to photograph candid moments in public of your own family/group of friends if anyone's else face showed up in the picture, that's not a world I want to live in.
It would also completely kill any form of street photography, even if you don't appreciate the art it would kill documenting times and places for posterity, for what benefit exactly?
Laws have non-binary options - for example, most countries have laws controlling industrial-scale air pollution which do not prevent you from grilling at home.
In this case, I think it would be interesting to think about the most concerning area: linking a person in a photo to their real-world identity. It seems like there could be restrictions on how face-recognition databases are built and accessed, possibly incorporating intent to harass or intimidate as an aggravating factor, and possibly linking across time and place. If I take a picture of some guys playing basketball or chess as I walk around town, I don’t need to identify them in my art exhibit entry and I certainly don’t need to link one of them to a different time and place without their permission.
This is programmer thinking, laws aren't algorithms.
The laws regardless this almost always make a distinction between intentionally surveillance and by chance background noise. Taking a picture of the street with people on it doesn't matter, recording the street 24/7 probably does, and purposefully singling someone out and photographing them definitely matters.
We already kind of have this. Think about it - stalking is illegal, but you've walked behind people right? You've glanced into someone's window before, right? You've taken a picture of a random person before, right?
So why aren't you in jail? Because laws aren't algorithms
Strengthening of your right to privacy against an entirely new paradigm of state and individual surveillance. It is a new world.
I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.
> I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.
We would not only lose an art form but also the recording of the past, a candid photo of today has a lot more value in 50-100 years, rather absurd to lose this. It wouldn't even guarantee anything, bad actors would continue to do so covertly.
I find it pretty hard to sacrifice it, it's a freedom, making society at large less free to fight tyranny doesn't seem the way to solve anything, e.g.: EU Chat Control bullshit.
I don't have a good answer either but I lean on the camp of seeking solutions that are smarter than a sledgehammer.
In Switzerland, you have the right to privacy including in public.
This means you can not make a photo/video of a person in public without their consent if they are the focus of your image. They also have the right to revoke consent anytime in the future.
The only exception is at large gatherings like for example the Street Parade where the expectation of privacy can not be expected especially since the event is televised.
This is also why you can not put cameras on your home that film public streets etc. They need to be blocked off or facing the other way.
Eh. These laws exist in DACH area but the result is that when someone's committing a crime, you can't film them in order to create evidence, because that would breach their right to privacy. Someone stole shit from your front porch? Someone broke into your car? Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.
In more sensible countries the law says that it's legal to film, but it's not legal to publish videos and photos of people without their consent.
You can record your own property and you can submit this to the police. However you need to put up notice on your property that you are recording.
Dash-cam footage is a gray area since the video is generally deleted automatically and not publicized. If the crime is severe enough the footage is permitted in court.
Criminals do not just get away just like that. There is a lot of public cameras run by for example the SBB (national train company). These cameras have strict rules as to how long the footage is stored and who has access. The footage will not be posted publicly unless in very very rare cases where the severity of the crime outweighs the privacy of the criminal.
How many innocent people have faced the wrath of the public because of false identification in the US when some grand event occurs? Does anyone remember Richard Jewell[1]?
> Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.
Are you looking at this from a US perspective where illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in court (fruit of the poisoned tree)? At least in Norway this is not the case, nor is it absolutely forbidden in the UK.
This is an erroneous blanket statement. Photographing people in public is illegal in plenty of places, depending on what exactly you're doing. Taking a picture of a big crowd is usually fine. Singling out individuals sometimes isn't.
IIRC some countries recently started experimenting with automagically granting copyright to people for their own likeness, I think it was aimed at AI generates fakes, but it's probably more widely applicable.
Anyway, don't be a dick, don't take pictures of people without their consent.
Well sure but all this is doing is displaying the audience on screens and drawing squares around their faces. I seriously doubt this breaks any law, I saw them in summer last year and they were already doing this, given that the article is about it happening rather than them getting sued, I think it's probably fine.
I subscribe to Bertrand Russell's hypothesis that the earth was created five minutes ago. Events that you remember do not necessarily have to have happened; memories were put in our minds. Impossible to prove wrong.
Based on the grammar and spelling mistakes in your post, I suspect that your written communication skills might be holding you back. It's quite easy to paste those paragraphs into ChatGPT and say "rewrite this." It will provide you with a clear and error-free version. I recommend doing this for every email you send. It can significantly increase the respect you receive from both your current coworkers and potential employers. Even though I have good grammar, I still use it for half the emails I send to see if they can be improved.
This is a slippery slope. These policies had a vast affect on the lives of millions of people. Business were shut down. Schools were closed. People were instructed to stay in their homes for years. Simply saying, "Well, we made our best guess," is absolutely not acceptable. When the government curbs human rights, they have an obligation to weigh and justify the costs with scientific evidence.
What is your suggested approach when there is no (reliable) scientific evidence for any course of action and not enough time to gather such (reliable) evidence? Note that not taking any action is also a decision that, in your framework, requires supporting evidence.
Not taking action doesn't require supporting evidence, and insickness didn't propose a framework in which it does. There is at any moment an infinite number of things you could choose to not be doing. You can't collect evidence for not doing those things, as the amount of evidence required would also be infinite.
Not taking any action is also a decision, and it has to be justified like anything else that will affect the health and lives of millions of people.
You don't need to collect evidence for everything you choose not to be doing, all you need is evidence that the status quo is not worse than any other (known) alternative.
In any case, my point was that you can't make decisions based on evidence when you are faced with a new situation for which there is no (reliable) evidence. In these cases some other approach is needed.
I don't know the Finnish equivalent of this but this is in the neighborhood of negligent homicide in the US. An enterprising prosecutor could probably make a decent case for 2nd degree murder.
This is very clearly in "spend somewhere between 1 and 2 decades turning big rocks into little rocks" territory to my punishment-focused American lizard brain.
This definitely sounds more like it and I am happy to be this week's example of why non-lawyers shouldn't speculate about what a particular crime is or is not :)
What he did is reprehensible. But comments like this are emotively loaded and provoke the ongoing debate around the purpose of jail term. In my opinion, even this length of sentence has a high chance of producing a hardened, bitter criminal with hacking skills.
> even this length of sentence has a high chance of producing a hardened, bitter criminal with hacking skills.
You present this as an argument for a shorter sentence. But from another perspective, it's an argument for never letting him out.
Prison isn't primarily meant to rehabilitate; you are almost certainly right that it will do the exact opposite in this case. Its power to deter is also limited. But what it can do, if we are simply willing to use it for that purpose, is contain dangerous people and prevent them from harming others again by simply not giving them the opportunity to do so.
> Prison isn't primarily meant to rehabilitate; you are almost certainly right that it will do the exact opposite in this case.
Prisons are meant for rehabilitation in Finland, where the case was decided. And the system maintains a lower recidivism rate than the US with a lower incarceration rate + less crime.
It is an argument, although that might count as unusually cruel or disproportionate for a crime like this. Even murderers in Finland are typically pardoned and released after 12-15 years.
> Even murderers in Finland are typically pardoned and released after 12-15 years
What about serial murderers? The damning part—to me—isn’t the crime per se but the repeat offenses.
The Finnish system is famously good at rehabilitating criminals. But what do you do with the edge cases? (I guess our system, which excels at incapacitation and retribution, has its edge cases in the unjustly imprisoned. Put that way, having the edge default to letting out a few incurable criminals from time to time might be the fairer solution.)
> While the maximum prison sentence in Norway is 21 years, the law was amended in 2002 so that, in rare cases, sentences can be extended indefinitely in five-year increments if someone is still considered a danger to the public.
> Put that way, having the edge default to letting out a few incurable criminals from time to time might be the fairer solution.
Blackstone's ratio[0]
He's a scumbag, but the folks that didn't secure that data were also complicit (although unintentionally). I know that the company went belly-up, but I'd suggest the company that wrote and sold the software also shares culpability, as they likely sold it as some kind of magic beans.
There's really no substitute for not collecting the information in the first place, but in this community, that's heresy.
Not looking to argue directly about the punishment, but I think it's quite clear that this individuals is ALREADY a hardened, bitter criminal with hacking skills and needs no assistance on that score.
Under Finnish law he isn’t - his prior crimes were a long time ago (caught anyway), and largely afaict while he was a kid. Most countries don’t treat children as adults, and in many - as here - crimes committed as a child get cleared.
I get that if you’re used to the US criminal justice system you believe the goal is to punish people as long as possible - with a side order of slave labor and electoral disenfranchisement - but all of the statistics show that that policy has worse outcomes across the board. It has higher costs, higher rates of recidivism, and lower trust in the judicial system - which encourages an us vs them mentality that further increases crime rates. Not to mention that if a child spends a decade in prison they’re coming out the other end with little to know ability to earn a non-crime living afterwards.
Other criminals can teach him how to not get caught or recruit him into larger organizations. Prison is like a startup incubator for gangs. When you put a bunch of people with similar interests in one place it's a great networking opportunity.
> From a post war crime boom and relatively high incarceration rates, Finnish prisons have emerged to be counted among the most humane correctional facilities in the world and yet, recidivism is very low compared to international standards.
Sounds similar to that of Norway which is known for its kind/compassionate treatment of prisoners.
Removing people from society is what we do when they do these kind of terrible things to others. 6 years of removal isn't enough. The debate you refer to is a separate thing.
This sounds a little like an appeal to tradition, unless I'm misunderstanding you. Removal from society is absolutely one of the intended purposes of prison, but as with all traditions it must be open to challenge and debate.
Rehabilitation is all the rage around these parts, but there are other reasons for prisons. One of the purposes of prison is to protect the public from dangerous people. Another aspect is the instructive element; you send a message to the rest of society about what kind of behavior will or won't be tolerated.
This man should be executed. It would be a fitting punishment for both of those reasons and more. He caused at least one suicide and victimized tens of thousands. This is a crime that calls for the death penalty.
