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Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

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Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#271

Post by morkalork »

pvarangot wrote: post #248
morkalork wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws that make something legal or not conditional on a hypothetical that hasn't happened yet are kind of lowsy. It's like the stand your ground one's where you can just say you believed your life was in danger.

Are you implying you should be able to shoot at someone just because they are at your house or something?

I'm not implying anything, just criticizing laws where guilt or innocence rests on claim of a hypothetical situation. Shooting someone when you believe your life may be in danger. One party consent recording allowed when you believe a crime may happen.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#272

Post by Libcat99 »

godelski wrote: post #252
Libcat99 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are in a physical space, you can look around you and somewhat reliably observe who can see you, hear you, and observe your actions. You've always then had the choice to base your actions and your speech on who will observe them, with the further knowledge that they might go on to share this with others. The difference isn't that what you do now can be shared. It's the ease of sharing and the fidelity with wh…

I mostly agree, but there's part that you're missing. Ease is a critical issue, but the capacity to record was substantially different back then too, and thus the validity of what was being shared. There's a big difference in someone claiming you said something vs someone having a recording of it. 20 years ago everyone wasn't walking around with a camera and microphone in their pocket. It is not only the ease in shar…

That's what I was getting at with the fidelity attribute.

Before you could observe an event and remember it (poorly) and share it (slowly) but technology, for better or worse, has greatly increased the possible fidelity of that memory, which can now shared endlessly without losing quality.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#273

Post by godelski »

hug wrote: post #268
godelski wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're getting into the definition of public vs private you also need to consider what constitutes a reasonable expectation. Not just from our current reference frame of everyone having phones and every business having cameras, but from a few decades ago as well as a century, or more, ago. What may constitute a reasonable expectation today may be extremely divorced from that of when the laws were written. I love t…

The definition is at its root: “private” is by nature privative: it is essentially defined by what isn’t . If privacy includes “not being observed”, “not being recorded” and “not being overheard” it is hard to have a conversation around asserting the right to privacy, when some of those rights are violated indeliberately and necessarily by virtue of you just being in view or earshot of another person. The thing you t…

I think this is because it is more nuanced that you, or most people, are giving credit to. Privacy is not a binary option of private vs public but rather a continuum. This is where "reasonable expectation" falls and tries to create a division, a third option. But I think we need more since the environment has changed. As an example, if in a public place you pull yourself and your friend to a dark corner that's obscured you have increased your expectation of privacy. Because you're literally "hiding." The extreme of this might be a public bathroom where you definitely do have a legal expectation of privacy despite being a public place.

So the problem here is that we're trying to make clear cut discriminators when the world has gotten a lot messier. Unfortunately legal systems require discretization, because it is easier to legislate clear boundaries (laws are piecewise functions -- if-then-else). But the world is messy and it needs to be recognized that those discrete boundaries are fuzzy too (i.e. they are guides, not hard fixed and objective boundaries). Probably also coupled with human propensity to discretize continuous variables due to the compression effects. This really is why we have many "know it when I see it" definitions rather than hard rules and you may notice that as complexity is increasing (making this more common) and so is the disagreement with said loose definitions. Then we have a core problem of communication breaking down because everyone is working off a different set of assumptions, assuming everyone else has the same assumptions, and unwilling to accept other bases because our assumptions are objectively generated ;)

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#274

Post by godelski »

ameister14 wrote: post #267
godelski wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech? > No, they don't, because that would not be a reasonable expectation. If you asked someone before 2000, do you think their answer would be different? Would setting/context change that? i.e. a person talking to their friend on the street vs giving a speech at a protest/demonst…

>If you asked someone before 2000, do you think their answer would be different No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers. >Would setting/context change that? i.e. a person talking to their friend on the street vs giving a speech at a protest/demonstration? Setting and context could change the expe…

> No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers.

Yeah, I don't buy that. Let me be quite specific: do you think someone would answer the following question differently "what is the likelihood that you will be on camera if you walk to the library and back?" I absolutely guarantee the numbers will change and approach 0 pretty rapidly. This is not just a psychological question (which does matter too btw) but a technological one. Clearly Ben Franklin would have answered that he would not expect such a thing despite being a person of high fame in his time.

> Setting and context could change the expectation of privacy, sure - if you're in a private place, it's different from being in public.

Except that this isn't a binary option. A public bathroom is a public space yet I think most people would be hard pressed to argue that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy there, especially in a stall. In fact, this is even legally codified. There's a spectrum of private-public and it is not clean cut. What I've suggested above is that there are variables you aren't considering. A person's model on the expectation of privacy is dependent not just on their condition of public/private property, but also on their expectation of people having recording devices, the expectation of that use, the expectation of ability to notice them, as well as other more refined setting attributes like doors, locks, and other such things. It is far more nuanced than "inside vs outside." As another clear example, I have a higher expectation of privacy being in the middle of a national forest than if I lived in a apartment on the first floor in a big city. Obviously there are more conditions and we can't have a reasonable conversation without recognizing this.

> Are you saying people have more of an expectation of privacy now?

Obviously not. Reread. "availability, accessibility, and utility" is referring to recording devices and the ability to search through them. Additionally, your analogy doesn't even make sense since a lot of investigative journalism does "spy" on people in private settings (e.g. source information from a dissenting party about a conversation that happened in a private room on private property). Again, way more nuanced than you are giving credit for.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#275

Post by nunuvit »

evandale wrote: post #259
nunuvit wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you But like you said, they lied about you provoking them and destroyed the evidence showing that you didn't. Nobody will ever know that they beat you up just because you were recording. I know why cops don't want body cams.

You quoted my conclusion without any context and ignored multiple crucial details: > You may have a chance to see justice because it won't matter if the cop and his 5 buddies say you provoked them with a camera. It's unambiguous that you can record them and there's no possibility of reasonable doubt if you're allowed to record them 100% of the time. There's no loophole they can use to say you can't record them due to…

He could say you told him you had a gun, and brandished what looked like a gun. No reason to admit that it's really about the camera.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#276

Post by ajhurliman »

SeanLuke wrote: post #75

> Plaintiff Project Veritas, a non-profit media organization that engages in undercover investigative journalism, states that it documents matters of public concern by making unannounced audiovisual recordings of conversations, often in places open to the public. This has got to be the single rosiest description of Project Veritas ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas

Is it rosy because the interviews reveal information you don’t like? Or because you think the information is attained unethically? Simply saying “I don’t like them” doesn’t advance a conversation much.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#277

Post by sschueller »

LocalH wrote: post #265
95014_refugee wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your baby/bathwater filter seems to be on the fritz. If, as in the common case, a police officer is performing their duty correctly, why should they as a private individual be singled out, maligned, their personal safety be threatened, etc. etc? If you’re coming at this from e.g. the US perspective where the situation with police is a very stylized us/them, this may feel odd.

If they're performing their duty correctly, a video of their work should not be harmful to them at all. Situations like this are the only time I feel the saying "if you don't have anything to hide, you'd let people look" is appropriate, when concerning people with power "over" common folk. This wouldn't apply to officers doing plainclothes or undercover work, as there would be no reason for a bystander to assume they…

There are other reasons to protect someones privacy. An office may be doing everything to the book but accidentally shit his pants due to what he had for lunch. Having a video of this circulate in public and being the laughing stock of the town is why we have these laws. With the internet something like this would haunt a person for their entire life.

Everyone deserves the right to privacy and misconduct should be dealt with by the appropriate superiors/agencies and not by public shaming.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#278

Post by ameister14 »

godelski wrote: post #274
ameister14 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you asked someone before 2000, do you think their answer would be different No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers. >Would setting/context change that? i.e. a person talking to their friend on the street vs giving a speech at a protest/demonstration? Setting and context could change the expe…

> No, I don't. I do not think reasonable people ever had an expectation of privacy while in public, especially when they are interacting with other people/strangers. Yeah, I don't buy that. Let me be quite specific: do you think someone would answer the following question differently "what is the likelihood that you will be on camera if you walk to the library and back?" I absolutely guarantee the numbers will change…

>Yeah, I don't buy that. Let me be quite specific: do you think someone would answer the following question differently "what is the likelihood that you will be on camera if you walk to the library and back?"

They'd probably answer that differently, same as if you asked them about someone filming them on their cell phone or any other technological change. That doesn't have much to do with your earlier question, though.

> There's a spectrum of private-public and it is not clean cut.

Sure, there is a spectrum, based on community norms. There is a degree of privacy you expect in a bathroom, and it is greater than the degree you expect at your table in a restaurant. I wouldn't describe being in a bathroom as being 'in public' though.

>Obviously not. Reread.

I think you should read the last paragraph you wrote on the comment I replied to. It was completely unclear. You were replying to a statement that even in Ben Franklin's time there was no expectation of privacy in public. You did not refute this, essentially saying 'times have changed, you're not considering how things have changed.' Logically, that means that there is now an expectation of privacy in public.

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#279

Post by JustBreath »

remix2000 wrote: post #236
JustBreath wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that explains the distinct lack of public freakout videos from Europe.

I think that's more related to the fact that most Europeans normally speak languages other than English.

A bit difficult to post them when they are illegal, no?

Re: Ban on recording without consent is unconstitutional, US court rules

#280

Post by Pent »

hug wrote: post #161
sschueller wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why public is considered "lack a reasonable expectation of privacy". In Switzerland this only applies if you are in public at a large gathering or event where the use of cameras etc. is expected. In any other situation in public, if you single out a specific person (even if their face is not visible but they are identifiable by clothing/tattoo or vehicle registration etc.) in a video you are violat…

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to come up with how to eloquently put this in English and I cannot. Maybe English lacks the appropriate terminology to express the difference between privacy and publicity within the expanded scope of current technology. It’s my only language, and I like to think I’m pretty good at it, but I’m absolutely stumped as to how you’d exactly word exactly what you’re not understandi…

>the act of being in public is public

the act of being in public may be widely distributed

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