To keep people engaged, social media platforms have shifted from showing you content from people you know to prioritizing viral content. The algorithms know viral content offers an endless stream of entertainment that keeps people scrolling longer.
Fb is clearly hated by its owners, Meta. Its been monitized to the max and deeply neglected. They desperately want to move on to virtual reality or AI - ANYTHING to escape from having to make their money off fb.
Makes one wonder what it would be like if someone else had built and maintained it who really belived in the vision of connecting communities instead of sucking them dry.
"Viral content" got nerfed to oblivion in 2013-2014 something when Facebook made companies pay up for group exposure. (Promoted post)
Before that a popular article could be shared among different friends networks to like total exposure to like everyone logged in that were somewhat interested in the article.
I was kinda a journalist then it was a really obvious flip.
Like the writer I'm also a 'boomer' still keeping connected to an older friend group using Facebook and Instagram. For Facebook, I use the plugin "FB Purity" to filter out the generated cr*p posts and force chronological order. It's shocking too see how few posts are left, by agressive algorithm filtering and FB then deciding that "You're all caught up", refusing to show more posts. So my FB time is about 20 seconds every day...
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.
