How the Rise of the Camera Launched a Fight to Protect Gilded Age Privacy

The throwaway line in TFA about village life and the section about common law recognizing no right to privacy both highlight my thoughts on this. In prior years we didn't have cameras preserving all our moments in 4K for all time, but as humans we had so little happening in our hamlets/villages, that most of our neighbors knew everything about us and all of our individual actions were never forgotten. Just like how you still remember all the embarrassing things different kids at your high school did (for me, 20+ years later). Life in a village was likely that same dynamic but for a person's whole life, not just high school

I live in a mid/upper middle class ex-urb that is basically Mayberry - our police Facebook page literally has posts like "Angie your Lab got out again, she's at the station" with a picture of the dog sitting at the chief's desk. A big crime wave is when they randomly flush the high school kids from their yearly "fooling around" camp by the river because they got rowdy and mooned the families kayaking. Yet somehow we now have about 100 flock cameras (and growing) recording every possible way in and out of town and at every subdivision entrance. It's crazy.

The pioneer of DeepFakes... "Anthony Comstock—the anti-obscenity crusader after whom the 1873 Comstock Act is named—had arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures that placed “the heads of innocent women on the undraped bodies of other females.” "

The real non-story in the article is describing the downright awful behaviour of advertisers and marketers, and trying to say the problem is cameras.

> "By 1905, less than 20 years after the first Kodak camera debuted, Eastman’s company had sold 1.2 million devices"

Smartphones today sell that many roughly every 9 hours[1]. Add laptops, tablets, quadcopter drones, dashcams, doorbells, CCTV cameras, compact cameras, DSLRs, cars with builtin cameras. I think we're still at the early days of cameras changing the world. "The future is here but it's not evenly distributed yet"; twenty years ago, Flickr and YouTube were founded. There's almost nothing you can't see online or on TV now: any activity, any place, any thing, especially including the minutiae of other people's lives and inside their homes from the luxurious to the impoverished, ostentatious or humble, everyday or holiday, there's countless photos and videos of it.

Want to see a driver's view of a tram or truck or bus journey in a foreign city? A trip on a luxury train or a remote mountain top? A helicopter flight, a submarine trip, Australian outback or Thai food stalls? People sitting on their couch watching TV and chatting about it, someone angrily ranting from their kitchen, people cooking food and eating it, people at work or relaxing, the insides of factories offices public places or government buildings, rare equipment and devices, museums, you-seeums, no-seeums up close; do you want voyeurism, inspiration, exploration, drama, tranquility, nature, disaster, ingenuity, warzone or poorzone, languages, opinions, the mundane, or the joys of propane?

You can find it, you can see it - you can drown in endlessly scrolling it, it can be tuned to your interests or sought on a whim - but you can't have it through a screen.

it will take more than 20 years for the effects on society to fully happen.

[1] Roughly 1.2Bn/year, ~100M/month, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone...

I love articles that completely dispel the idea of singularity - that point out that the feeling of our age that things are changing too quickly has been around for a very long time.

I think of a passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence:

""" The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. """

This seems analogous to how large companies now scrape user-generated content to train their language models for profit.

Does Facebook still use your pictures in ads?

Article form ~10yr ago: https://mashable.com/archive/facebook-ads-photo#ggcKnNfAUaqy

Boy, this stuff shore do sound familiar...

It does give me hope that we'll hammer out some ethical and legal structure, eventually, and, also, that folks will learn to live in the new world.

Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859854>

9 (13) days ago. 46 points. 8-ish comments.

Exclusion through technological adherence.

"...arrested an amateur photographer for selling manually photoshopped pictures..."

Am I the only one who finds the phrase "manually photoshopped" in an article about the late 1800s to early 1900s amusingly anochronistic? How about "manually doctored" or even "altered"?

The idea of privacy has been thoroughly frustrated. Today, there's no expectation of privacy any more, let alone “reasonable expectation of privacy”. Expecting privacy has become unreasonable by definition.

Our relationship with technology is an Escher staircase. Similar thing happening anew with visual genAI.