In the US, at least, it's pretty much legal to record the public as long as people have no expectation of privacy (IANAL, exclusions apply, non-commercial use, etc)
It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:
- I told someone else something I saw the other day
- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed
- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law
- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw
- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc
- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did
- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy
Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?
I'll at least throw out some options
- Implement some form of right to forget
- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these
- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes
I agree with your first point - but Meta and other organizations don't really have to act in a socially acceptable manner at their scale. Creating laws at least opens the door to legal action to keep them in line.
My last two bullets intentionally walked the line on stalking and spoke to some of the arguments law enforcement have attempted to use to nefariously surveil the public without a warrant [0].
I also have a difficult time jamming 'right to forget' through the first amendment protections in the United States but it does provide some protection/agency to individuals to protect their identity.
It's not a legal problem but a cultural one. Piracy, for example, is already illegal, but everyone does it.
Smartphones and social media apps made it frictionless to post public videos on the Internet. The only legislation that could be effective would be to forbid social media from hosting videos of public places somehow, and I'm not sure how effective or practical would that even be.
We live in a world where people have a literal phone in their hands and they would rather make a video call than a simple phone call. Something needs to happen to fundamentally change people's habits or it will only get worse in the future.
Some of those are definitely not legal, by any reasonable reading of the Constitution. The 4th Amendment in particular is predicated on a reasonable reading.
The problem is that our courts have utterly failed to stand up for civil rights. This is especially true of the Supreme Court, who quite literally define how the law is interpreted.
Much of this could be solved if the base system simply came with basic utilities.
Windows XP had an audio recording app and most people didn't even have microphones. Now we have smartphones that don't have a way to record audio as a file or even write text notes built into the system, forcing you to use third-party tools that can be maliscious.
Default installed apps are often carrier dependent.
It is true that at certain points I have bought brand new Android phones that did not come with such basic utilities, including utilities that bargain priced feature phones were expected to have, like a sound recorder.
IIRC, the Droid Turbo 2 I got in 2016ish came with Android 2 and did not come with a sound recording app stock. It also did not have a file browser stock. This was a Flagship product. The flashlight was not included for long enough for the top ten app, a flashlight app, to be on a significant quantity of android phones and end up being a data harvesting operation.
WP essentially lets plugins do anything they want. The plugins are just scripts that register callbacks to events. WP calls events on BASICALLY EVERY FUNCTION. This is without exaggeration. I don't remember the exact names right now, but if you have a function like wp_get_title that gets the title of a post, there will be a "get_title" event that can modify which title is returned. So for every function first the data is computed using the default WP way, then plugins are allowed to discard all that work and replace it without something else entirely. There are events for deciding the canonical URL, for deciding the description of a post, for deciding whether RSS links will be displayed or not (the callback just returns true or false), etc.
In other words, every property can be modified through global event callbacks. Some events are called very early in the whole pipeline that let plugins just render whatever they want (e.g. render custom XML sitemaps).
By the way, was that that movie a boy plays a game with an A.I. and the same A.I. starts a thermonuclear war or something like that? I think I watched the start when I was a kid but never really finished it.
I heard this being described as an "accountability sink." A system designed in such way that when something bad happens, there is nobody to be held accountable. It feels pervasive in the modern world.
It would be very ironic if the reason people complain about Facebook so ardently is that they just didn't have enough friends IRL in first place to make Facebook work the way it should.
I have one circle of friends who are barely online at all. Their phones exist for minimal e-mails and texts and that's it. A couple don't even have a dedicated internet connection at home. Their experience on Facebook wouldn't be good either.
I do agree with your general sentiment, though: Many complaints about Facebook come from people who don't want to invest time into finding their friends online and engaging with friend content. They log in, see what the article sees, assume that's all there is, and abandon it. Most people just move on, but a few will complain about Facebook based on their limited experience from 10 years ago.
I'd amend that as "didn't have enough [IRL] friends *on FaceBook* in first place", but that starts off a conversation about platforms being only-technically not required socially, network effects, etc.
So you are saying that it is authors fault? How about not showing you shit instead when there is nothing else to show?
It is like saying that in order to keep my e-mail inbox full and entertaining from now on your email provider will fill it with AI generated content. Madness.
