Very few commenters seem to realize that this decision affects only "States prohibiting recording without providing notice
to or obtaining consent from the recording’s subjects
when created in a place where the subjects lack a
reasonable expectation of privacy“ (e.g. when talking in public).
Which is only 5 states: Alaska, Kentucky, Montana, Massachusetts and Oregon.
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 violating their privacy and are required to get consent. This consent can also be revoked at any time later.
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 understanding.
I feel like it’s a case of the language we speak shaping our interpretation of what is just, and doing so in such a way that it’s hard to even explain what we’re now missing.
The problem, in so many words, is that these days the act of being in public is public. That’s a weird sentence to write, and I’m not sure how else to put it.
Previously, the memory of any public act was restricted to those who were there to observe it at the time. Any acts in public were by themselves public. Acts in private were private. There was a third quasi-state: anonymous isn’t the right word, because you were always identifiable, but by happenstance you just weren’t. You were in public, but not publicised. Recognisable, but not recognised. Observable, but not observed. By definition though you were always in public, never in private.
Modern technology has somewhat erased the third state by slowly but surely eroding the cases in which you are not observed, tracked, recorded, or identified, by some technology or another. It’s made public very public, if you excuse the unavoidable pleonasm.
There’s no good word for the third state, that I can think of, and it makes me sad.
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 which it can be shared.
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 sharing and identifying, but even the base capacity to perform the action in the first place. If you were being recorded on video in the past, you'd likely notice the bulky camcorder mounted on some guy's shoulder. (not even mentioning that resolution was very different and depth of field is not a negligible).
20 years ago you did not have a reasonable expectation to be recorded in the public physical space. This is contingent upon the probability of someone being able to perform an action, and even more so without you being aware of said action being performed. That wasn't that long ago...
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.
Agreed. I also get flummoxed whenever I try to talk about this stuff.
Further, I've only recently appreciated that our modern folk understanding of right to privacy has eclipsed its twin, the right to personal autonomy.
The development of the doctrine regarding the tort of "invasion of privacy" was largely spurred by the Warren and Brandeis article, "The Right to Privacy". In it, they explain why they wrote the article in its introduction: "Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society". ...
They then clarify their goals: "It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is".
Brandeis & Warren were motivated by the evils of "yellow journalism", the social media of its day.
"The U.S Constitution safeguards the rights of Americans to privacy and personal autonomy. Although the Constitution does not explicitly provide for such rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution protect these rights, specifically in the areas of marriage, procreation, abortion, private consensual homosexual activity, and medical treatment."
I love the EU's notion of consent wrt privacy (h/t @sschueller). Will definitely learn more about their system. My hunch is consent is akin to respecting another's autonomy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the EU laws contingent upon legality?
Article 8.2
> Such data must be processed fairly for specified purposes and on the basis of the consent of the person concerned __or some other legitimate basis laid down by law.__ Everyone has the right of access
to data which has been collected concerning him or her, and the right to have it rectified.
I mean we can take this in good faith, but at the same time Article 20 says everyone is equal in the law but there are several royal families and constitutions that make said families above the law. I love the idea in principle (and far better than nothing) but I personally am not fully trusting. It is, after all, our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.
Sorry, for EU & privacy, I've only read up on GDPR, briefly. Back when I was trying to wrap my head around USA privacy stuff, I'm embarrassed I didn't have the gumption to compare and contrast with other systems.
> our duties as citizens within a democratic nation(s) to challenge the authority and laws, to keep them in check.
Preach!
--
My notions about "trust", which confuses me endlessly, evolved while I was working on election integrity (voter privacy) and patient medical records. (Separate efforts.)
"Trust" in government is something like a qwan. Whenever I try to talk about trust, I usually end up contradicting myself.
I once heard the US Constitution was created in an orgy of mistrust.
We're familiar with checks & balances, which is fundamental and necessary and good. But we also need the mutual mistrust of all the belligerents, at every level, all the time.
I was a poll worker for a while. We'd tabulate and post our precinct's results the moment the polls closed.
For observers, that public posting was not a proof of truth, that these are the numbers. Rather, it was an attestation by the participating representatives of the major political parties that we all agreed to abide by the posted results.
As you can imagine, most of the time it's just a semantic difference. But it is a difference in perspective. And becomes far more than semantic once the margin of error becomes relevant (challenged ballots, provisionals, verifying the voter rolls, etc, etc).
And that's kind of where I am now wrt "trust". Applied to government, any given org, or my neighbors.
Secondly, my personal operating definition of trust has changed from "confidence" to "matches my expectations (predictions)".
I have almost zero confidence that my government, or any other person or org, will "do the right thing", whatever that might be.
Now I try to predict outcomes, based on past behavior and my folk understanding of the human condition, plus intuition, mixed with cynicism.
I can even "trust" liars, and terrible drivers, and walking my dog off-leash, and otherwise merely flawed entities, if I can predict their actions and the outcomes. (Cite "Everybody Lies" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.)
And if I want to change outcomes, to increase my "confidence" in a system, I have to participate, to maybe change the trajectory a few arc-seconds. Ideally, by focusing on durable structural and process reforms. Instead of demanding specific outcomes, which are easy to accommodate and are unlikely to change future outcomes.
Okay. Thanks for your reply and nudge and reading this far. I can't yet answer your question. And I felt compelled to (over) share my notions of trust, based on my past failures and shortcomings as an activist.
The distinction makes sense, but of course the counter-argument would be: what prevented someone, using earlier forms of technology, from documenting your presence at that public place and then publishing it ... say in written or illustrated form? We had newspapers, illustrators, journalists and printers well before photography, microphones and the Internet. Even if we remove those media, what is to prevent someone from communicating their observations verbally and having news of your presence spread by word of mouth? A conversation between two people at a coffee shop could be transcribed by pen & paper by an eaves dropper at an adjacent table. The wait staff or owner could report your presence to whomever they choose, including the media.
I'm a very private person and welcome more privacy protection, but I've always been swayed logically by the "no expectation of privacy in public" argument. As long as people can see you with your own two eyes and hear you with their own two ears, it seems to me like the existence of recorded media and more efficient distribution channels is moot.
What prevented documenting and publishing public acts in the past?
Merely an infeasibility to scale that with economically and socially reasonable levels of effort - actually an impossibility. The law and culture have not changed fast enough to keep up with obvious conclusions that result from the fast pace of technological change. There is a quantitative but not qualitative difference, but that's still an important difference!
For example, imagine that in the 70s, you might have had police officers with radios sitting on the shoulders of roads around a city, watching for a license plate and vehicle description to catch a suspect. That was reasonable, courts reasonably ruled that license plates were public information, that's the whole point of vehicle registration. But it would cost a pile of money to have professional humans use their eyes and brains for every hour you wanted to surveil those roads. It would have been impossible for humans to manually hand-write every plate and vehicle at rush hour, and if they could, it would be impossible for clerks to cross-reference traffic logs and store them in file cabinets, and if they could, it would be impossible to analyze the exploding warehouse of records to find anything of interest. And even if you could, the many humans in that chain would ask questions; you'd employ a tenth of the town to surveil their neighbors. But now, for less than it costs to have a single manned police cruiser on the road for a month, you can have 24/7/365 license plate monitoring on every road in and out of and through a city, logging events to a database that can analyze and query the computationally insignificant few hundred thousand results effortlessly. And that doesn't even get into the novel, unexpected, deanonymizing things you can do once you have reams of data!
A cop watching license plates was implicitly limited due to the cost of employing a human, that human's inability to be two places at once, that human's limited attention span, sensory capacity, and data recording abilities. It doesn't mean that removing those limitations and doing the same thing everywhere and all the time with omnipresent, omniscient, effortless nanobot surveillance is reasonable!
I think you're getting to the critical points here:
- manually, non-recorded, surveillance was difficult as it required a lot of man power. It also was contingent upon the trustworthiness of the source!
- Recorded surveillance was expensive and bulky, making it unlikely in the first place.
- Storage of data, both physical and digital (film or tape), was expensive, bulky, and difficult to search.
Now all that has changed, and in extreme ways. It is now very feasible and cheap to put up a camera to record 24/7, store that data for lengthy periods of time, and automatically search that data for cheap and in a reasonable amount of time as well. Acting like the 70's (or even 2000's) and 2020's are the same in expectations of surveillance is ludicrous at best.
The challenge you have is not language related, but rather logic related. The issue our Swiss friend raises is valid, no matter the language.
Do Americans not have an expectation of privacy even when talking in public, based on the expectations of the individuals engaged in speech?
For example, when you are at a restaurant with friends, is there not an expectation of privacy within the context of your conversation with someone? Any reasonable person will have an expectation of privacy that will generally be limited to all those people around your table and with whom you will be making eye contact, as long as you are speaking at a tone that is reasonable for that context. No? Is the speaker going to be speaking so that everyone in the restaurant can understand their speech? No? So it’s not public then, right? Ignoring incidental overhearing, of course.
Inversely, if we consider what the American system clearly considers private, the home and, by extension, the car; if you have ever heard a conversation through thin walls between apartments or maybe a phone conversation on car speaker blasted speakerphone, is that private then? … are Phone conversations then also not private since in most cases the caller will not likely be aware that their direct conversation partner is blasting their conversation to the parking lot on the car’s speaker phone?
These scenarios, among others, beckon a requirement to make privacy expectations approaching unachievable. Is that reasonable? No, of course not.
And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones that make all conversations within any line of sight or even just things you whisper into someone’s ear not radically private based on the current American nonsensical definition reasonable and privacy.
The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter.
None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote, let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment. They would think we’ve gone insane, because were have our, more accurately, sophist psychological manipulators and abusers have driven us so insane that we engage in the horrid abominations and abuses that are normalized all around us today. It has long been an ever worsening entropy problem.
To provide some clarity on my own position, I understand and echo your desire to have a society in which our quiet moments are not intruded upon. I am not arguing that the expectation that you not be monitored is unreasonable. What I am saying is that these feelings do not line up in a tidy way with the words “private” and “public”.
In all versions of modern English that I’m aware of, “public” is an antonym of “private”. In all conversations around this topic, they are often treated as though they are not. There’s an intuition gap that you rely on your conversational partner to cross. What you do is say “I have a right to privacy, and by privacy I do not mean literally private, I mean incidentally non-public, due to circumstance”, only not in so many words. It’s the way I talk about it as well, because there’s no well understood and unambiguous way to describe what I just called “incidentally non-public”.
Assuming, of course, that you accept that public and private are antonyms, you can demonstrate this intuition gap by instead of talking about public and private, using another pair of antonyms and talking about up and down, and instead ask the question: Does everyone have the right to be up while down?
That’s obviously a terrible and nonsensical question, but I feel it is exactly what some people read when they encounter someone’s desire for privacy in public. How can you be private in public? How can you be up while down?
This isn’t sophistry or maliciousness: it’s a real way that real people interpret the conversation. Failure to recognise the intuition gap is what leads to a failure to understand the other person you’re talking to.
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 the nuance you are getting into, but I do think it needs to be taken at least one step further for a good conversation to take place. People are working with different assumptions and not communicating these well and results in very different versions of reasonable expectation. 50 years ago, even 20, it was pretty reasonable to assume that you could not, let along would not, be recorded unless you were involved in a large public demonstration. I think if we're getting down to public vs private that we should also consider this aspect. And I think we should recognize the difference between a private activity within a public space from a public activity within a public space. The ecosystem has changed and with it we must be a bit more nuanced.
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 touch on at the end—not quite privity, not quite secrecy, not quite privacy—is the thing I wish I had a word for.
It’s exactly this ur-privacy, though, that people find missing in their lives and are trying to express a well understood, if cloudy, desire for. It’s also something that I tend to agree with the various European governments on, despite my annoyance at the “I know it when I see it” nature of the thing.
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 ;)
>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.
>The problem in America is not the speech part, but rather that the logic and reason itself has been inverted and perverted by sophists and abusive manipulators over the decades, which have turned everything upside down, including the definitions of “reasonable”, “public”, and “private”, i.e., the core logic of the matter. . . None of the founders of America and the writers of the Constitution would recognize any of these current assumptions built into definitive and even the words they wrote
I'm pretty sure the founders of The United States and the writers of the Constitution would understand that speaking at a restaurant (in their day, more likely in a public house) with friends is public.
Ben Franklin was a newspaper-man. You think he didn't deal with things overheard and published? These people were revolutionaries - successful revolutionaries generally know that their acts can be witnessed if not done in private spaces.
>let alone all the illogical and lazy cruft that has been added after the twelfth amendment
Weird cut-off, friend. To me, some of the illogical and lazy cruft was added prior to that in order to justify owning other people.
>> 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/demonstration?
I think before you call reference to Ben Franklin, you have to also consider the differences in settings between today and then. A lot has changed and the discourse around the subject is not properly taking this into account, and often not even acknowledging the existence of change in the first place. "Reasonable expectation" is deeply contingent upon the availability, accessibility, and utility. This cannot be an ignored part of the conversation.
>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 expectation of privacy, sure - if you're in a private place, it's different from being in public.
>I think before you call reference to Ben Franklin, you have to also consider the differences in settings between today and then. A lot has changed and the discourse around the subject is not properly taking this into account, and often not even acknowledging the existence of change in the first place.
Are you saying people have more of an expectation of privacy now? I thought your whole argument went the other way.
> 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.
>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.
> That doesn't have much to do with your earlier question, though.
It has everything to do with the question. Being recorded is a different level of privacy invasion than being seen.
> I wouldn't describe being in a bathroom as being 'in public' though.
And thus why you can't assert that your definition is absolute. If people are disagreeing and you admit community norms differ, then you can't have an objective reference and that's my main point.
>Being recorded is a different level of privacy invasion than being seen.
Why do you think I used the newspaper-man example? Being recorded in text has happened for a long time.
>you can't assert that your definition is absolute. If people are disagreeing and you admit community norms differ, then you can't have an objective reference and that's my main point.
I never asserted that my definition was absolute. I applied the spectrum to your examples. A 'reasonable person' standard is not an arbitrary bright-line rule, it's representative of the community and what their idea of a reasonably prudent person's expectations and behavior are.
> Why do you think I used the newspaper-man example?
And a voice recording is even more reliable and convincing but hasn't existed for "a long time." A camera is even more so. Today's state is not equivalent to a written record. Basically take your newspaper-man, make them better, and make a lot more of them. Your argument is failing to convince me not because I haven't understood your argument, it is failing because the assumptions being made are shaky. I will not buy a claim that anyone honestly believes that a random person telling their friend about something they overheard is equivalent to that same person showing their friend an audio recording or a video.
This is what I have been consistently claiming and saying is a critical aspect where you keep just saying that people have memories. These are not the same, and it is not remotely reasonable to say that they are the same. And if this were all that mattered, then you'd have a reasonable expectation of privacy were you to walk around a non-metropolitan city late at night while everyone else sleeps, simply due to you having a reasonable expectation of everyone being asleep. If you want to be convincing, dig into the complexity and connections that are related to your argument. Think about the factors that interplay and through what mechanisms. Specifically look at how these variables changed over time (taking into account prevalence and utility). Honestly, I don't think you can do this without coming to a very different conclusion. You're lacking sufficient complexity to account for the relevant data. It is fine to start simple, but you gotta add complexity to make strong conclusions. Ignoring the difference between cameras and newspapers isn't helping.
> And that’s before we explore things like focused beam microphones
Let's drop that. Instead, let's remember that 20 years ago there was not an expectation that someone would be carrying a microphone and camera on them. It was also less likely that one could do so without you noticing. Not to mention the quality of those devices was exceptionally lower, making identification harder and requiring you to be in much closer proximity. Take that back just another decade and a camera needed to sit on your shoulder, making you easily identifiable.
A problem with a lot of these conversations is that they're using modern technologies and notions in reference to laws that were written well before these things. There is a big difference between a very small number of easily identifiable people who require large resources to record the public, doing so in low resolution, and the modern notion of trivially doing so, and in high definition. Not to mention the ease/cost of storage, ability to search, and share that we have today. The Overton Window has shifted so much that we're completely forgetting the landscape differences.
Please read at least the 13th amendment before using the 12th as a cutoff! It's hard to believe you know what any of the amendments say if you're claiming those after the 12th are illogical.
I think there's a distinction between being recorded in the first place, and what the recording might be used for in the future. I think it's OK to permit a recording to take place in a public place without explicit consent, but still require consent to use that recording in (for example) publishing it where someone is a feature in that publication (as opposed to someone who happens to be in the background and remains otherwise unidentified).
Nowadays technology might mean that someone anonymous gets identified by a third party using automation. So it will become public knowledge, indexable on the person, as to where they were and what they were doing. But that was going to happen anyway. I'm not sure restricting recordings in the first place is really going to stop that.
I think the problem is that the environment has changed and people are applying those changes post hoc to the previous environment and when laws were written. Things have changed a lot and I think we need to act accordingly. Continuing as if it all is the same is like boiling a frog, and it is surprising how fast you can turn up the heat. It may seem drastic, but I have seriously considered messaging dang to nuke this account. Not just delete it, but purge all text as well. A strong divorce from the standards, but that is because [deleted] used to be reasonably sufficient to hide one's identity. We now live in a world where I can reasonably expect to be deanonymized by my words alone and that it is not unlikely that this capacity will be in the hands of the public in the next 5-10 years, along with entire copies of the internet. I do think what we've seen with digging up old tweets will take on a new and pervasive form (likely with even more error). But going back to specifically recording...
The truth is that we live in a _very_ different world than when these laws were set up. The idea of reasonable expectation was very different because you wouldn't reasonably expect to walk down the street being recorded since cameras were bulky, expensive, and uncommon. Now every single person has one in their pockets, most businesses are recording you, you're being recorded from airplanes in the sky[0], and not too long from now satellites will (governments already have this capacity but commercial is near there[1]). You didn't have a reasonable expectation for the person standing next to you to be capable of recording your conversation. It was possible for them to wear "a wire" but the likelihood was very low. Likelihood being low is equivalent to "reasonable expectation." The reasonable expectation of not being recorded didn't come from being hidden or out of sight, it came from the fact that the technology either didn't exist or wasn't prevalent. Not it is ubiquitous. And despite it seeming so normal, most of this change happened in the last 20 years.
But we're getting to the next paradigm shift, which makes all the above even more pervasive. ML/AI. I say this as someone that works in ML/AI and loves the field with a passion (you'll see me discuss it a lot here). But the technology also has downsides (commonly referred to as "malicious AI"). It isn't AGI, it is the ML that already exists. We can identify faces in a crowd and track them across different videos. We can take that 2 pixel person, segment it, and track it (done manually in the radiolab referenced in [0]). We can identify a person by the way that they walk (gait recognition[2]). We can track you by your wifi and bluetooth signal within a building. And so much more. This technology has supercharged the surveillance ecosystem (not somewhere I work in, obviously) and you bet it is being used by countries who don't have the best human rights records (let's not make this a (who's) dick (is the ugliest) measuring contest). Things have changed well beyond what we could have reasonably assumed 20 years ago, even 10. Now, it is not unreasonable to believe that such systems will also perform on the web and that your text is likely identified by you patterns, not just your fingerprint.
And this is really it. This stuff is so prolific that we've erased our memory of the past and re-framed this "normal" behavior as applicable to the past and try to justify it. 20 years ago you could walk down the street and reasonably assume that you would not show up on any single camera. Moreso, you could reasonably assume that if you did, you wouldn't show up on many. That that video was unlikely to make it to the internet. And that that video would likely be low grade and unable to identify you. These are all different things, but combined they sum to the expectation that there would not be a record of your movement contingent upon your ability to be identified (same applies to the internet and our chat forums in a similar line of reasoning). __STOP JUSTIFYING "REASONABLE EXPECTATION"__ without recognizing that the ecosystem has rapidly changed and is significantly different from when those laws were written. You are not making a strong argument but rather just reinforcing the surveillance paranoia (as in, people who are paranoid[3] about surveillance will increase said paranoia due to increased relaxation coupled with "nothing to hide" mentality that enables said surveillance).
=== TLDR ===
Just because you were in public didn't mean you'd reasonably expect to be recorded. The ecosystem has rapidly changed and we need to recognize this. 10-20 years ago you didn't have a reasonable expectation to be recorded (video or audio) in public as {government,corporate,civilian} recording capabilities were far less.
[1] Planet is getting ready to deploy a 30cm resolution (person = ~2 pixels) constellation called Pelican. It is not real time! But it shouldn't be unreasonable to believe it will be in the future. Current resolutions can already clearly identify cars. https://www.planet.com/products/pelican
[3] Paranoia is a bad word because it implies an unjustified or unwarranted mistrust. I think we can all agree that to some degree there is justification. The disagreement is just how much. But I am using the term because it is more prolific and I think the context is appropriate to draw upon the dichotomy in how what was once thought to be tinfoil hat claims become reality: see Snowden. 50 years ago a person that claimed our every move would be tracked -- in the real world and virtual -- would have been called crazy. It was even the stuff of dystopian science fiction. Now we call that a Thursday.
> Just because you were in public didn't mean you'd reasonably expect to be recorded.
Sure, but as you say, times have changed and the law needs to keep up. I agree. In my post that you replied to, what I'm saying is that it's futile to adjust the law to prevent people from being recorded. It's better for the law to specify what is acceptable to do with recordings once they are made.
In Europe, that's already happening. For example, in Europe, processing any data relating to your identity, including what can be derived from such recordings, is quite limited under the law. Many uses that you might be concerned about already require your express consent.
Just to be clear, I'm not countering your premise, I'm adding to it and providing additional context to justify such an addition. I think you're mainly right that it is better to regulate the usage but I think that we should use the framing of what is being done in public to help define how that data can be used. E.g. a person randomly talking to their friend should have a more respected privacy than a person screaming in the middle of the streets.
This is the norm in Europe. Filming a crowd is fine, making a picture of the Eiffel tower with people around it is fine, filming a specific person and publishing it without their consent generally isn't. "Generally" because obviously it gets more interesting in the specifics of when it is ok, but those are exceptions similar to how copyright has exceptions.
“THE TOWER ILLUMINATED
Controlled use
The various illuminations of the Eiffel Tower (golden illumination, twinkling, beacon and events lighting) are protected.
The use of the image of the Eiffel Tower at night is therefore subject to prior authorisation by the SETE. This use is subject to payment of rights, the amount of which is determined by the intended use, the media plan, etc.”
Not at all actually. There is a constant stream of compromising material posted online in Europe. It's a huge problem actually, because it's notoriously hard to get such stuff taken down, as the authorities simply do not care.
Yes, you would need to make them unidentifiable by blurring their face, anonymizing their voice and any other feature that may identify them.
Wide shots of crowds are generally ok in public, the issue is focusing on specific people. For example someone having a mental breakdown in public.
You also can not have door bell or private cameras pointing to public streets/roads. You have to ensure your camera only records your property and you are required to post a sign that a camera is installed.
It may or may not be OK to record without having a notice if your intention is a specific private use, like your own legal defense. It would certainly not be OK to publish a video clip of a specific person you encountered that may be embarrassing.
For example, you can be fined for publishing footage of an accident where someone was hurt and may feel embarrassed that other see them in that condition, but it may be OK to give it to police or legal council of people involved.
Jein (German word joke that combines Ja & Nein / Yes & No).
The short answer is: they are allowed BUT. There are many privacy rules that prohibit the actual use of these recordings (not limited to publishing but in court as well).
If it's similar to Denmark or Germany, then yes. More or less.
If you use a wide angle lens form afar and the person in question is just a small blimp in the background it can be ok. At least that is how I understood it.
But you can't just walk up to a person and take their photo.
You also can't have a security / doorbell camera that records public road. I think if you watch it live, that part can be recorded. But no 24/7 background recording of public spaces.
I wonder if there are exceptions for photographing police and other government officials? Seems like there should be. And what about the reverse? Are police body cams allowed?
Same applies, you can film the police but you can't post it online as they as individuals have a right to privacy as well. Misconduct is handled by the appropriate authoritative which will view such tapes but not by the Public although such footage will end up in the media with the police officer's identities anonymized.
Police body cams are permitted but the handling of the recordings is very strictly controlled. The same applies to public cameras such at train stations etc. There are clear signs indicating they are present and the footage has strict retention policies. In many cities now it is also illegal for these camera to do any type of face recognition.
In only very extreme situations can the government share footage with the media where a person is identifiable.
That's interesting. It must make it a lot more difficult for reporters trying to capture images and videos of newsworthy events. It seems like exposing corruption could be a lot more difficult if regulatory capture ever happens.
It gets more country-specific the deeper you get into it, but usually there are exceptions for people in the public eye (like politicians or celebrities), events of sufficient public interest, etc.
> you can film the police but you can't post it online as they as individuals have a right to privacy as well
This is perverse. What "privacy right" do police officers have when they are on duty or acting under color of law? I think no public official should have a right to privacy while they are actively performing their duties as public officials (this would not apply to their personal life, which is why there should also be very strict restrictions to ensure that all public work is done in public). I also count police officers in this, since they have extra-legal rights compared to the rest of us, being the very embodiment of the state's "monopoly on violence".
If a police officer is doing something heinous, why should they deserve any privacy at all outside of their personal life, where they in theory don't have the right to use their police powers?
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 were a police officer being abusive or doing their job incompetently. This would apply to uniformed officers going outside of the bounds of what is reasonable. It's not a perfect solution, no, but it's a lot better than "uniformed officers have a right to privacy while uniformed and officering, and it is morally wrong to film them in the process of wrongdoing".
There must always be strong checks on authority, lest it be abused. Perhaps the US is up there in the list of offenders, but then again they're not the worst offender in the world by far. Any modern democratic nation is susceptible to authoritarians and fascists wresting control if they don't institute strong protections against it happening.
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.
Is Switzerland as covered in security cameras as the USA?
Because there's not really a whole lot of public places aside from parts of national and state parks where one could reasonably expect to not be on a camera most of the time, right?
Since this ruling came from the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, wouldn’t this ruling only affect Alaska, Montana, and Oregon from the above 5 states?
Though worth noting that different circuit courts absolutely pay attention to each others rulings, even though they're not legally binding precedent. If a clear case and solid ruling happens in one circuit the others may all go on similar lines. If a different federal appeals court comes to a totally different conclusion, that's a "circuit split" and is one of the major points at which SCOTUS becomes very likely to then step in and resolve it for the whole country.
If this ruling gets appealed not impossible SCOTUS would take it anyway, but I'm not enough of a court watcher to have any sense of whether it might be considered ripe or important enough from just this one instance.
Courts below a circuit also pay attention to other circuits. If there is no ruling in their circuit a judge will cite the other circuit(s) in their ruling. (they can go either way, but they make it clear they considered it and why they think the other circuits are right/wrong) Rarely a judge will cite a different circuit and go against their own circuit, but this is very rare (either the judge will point out substantial differences from the case the circuit ruled on and those differences mean the ruling shouldn't apply - this is likely to be appealed and if the higher court remains firm it is a black mark on the lower judge; or the judge will point out the law changed and so the ruling isn't valid anymore unless the higher court rules it unconstitutional which of course then lower judge cannot do)
I did not see such a limitation in the ruling (although I admit to just scanning it). Instead the ruling seemed to focus on the distinction between the permissibility of recording police officers versus other government officials.
Based on the page 5 and 6 description of Oregon statute 165.540(1)(c), loteck’s conclusion seems correct to me. Page 43 is the conclusion where the statute is reversed and remanded.
So this basically allows blanket surveillance of anything you do in public to the point that paparazzi or stalkers could just legally chase and livestream you every minute after you exit your home until you enter another private space?
I'll never understand why Americans believe there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces. An alleyway is very different from a stage in the town square.
1) Americans place freedom of speech (including photography or recording things) very highly and are willing to suffer some damage in exchange for more freedom.
2) Limits on recording in public would very quickly and very easily be weaponized by police against minorities, leftists, and basically anyone else who resists the creeping tide of ---- well, you know, right wing politics.
Saving celebrity's from paparazzi sounds nice and good, but we're more worried about what happens when the police show up. Can we record them attacking us, or will that now be considered an additional crime that the policeman will get to punish us for? It's very easy to see our rigged Supreme Court ruling that police officers have "an expectation of privacy on the job" in light of your points.
Those exceptions won't stop police from thinking you can't record them and using that as a reason to bust your phone followed by busting your lip. Him and his 5 buddies will go on to say that you provoked them and you'll never see justice.
In general, North American police are ignorant bullies who couldn't hack it through high school or college. Their maturity level is stuck in the past as well, usually never maturing past a 12th grade level.
Ok, so let's remove the ban and the exceptions and make it legal to record anyone.
Then you record a cop who doesn't want to be recorded. The cop beats you up, breaks your phone, and busts your lip. He and his five buddies say you provoked him, and you never see justice.
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 privacy or safety or whatever other reasons they want to make up and they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you.
Do you ever wonder why cops don't want bodycams on them recording 24/7? Their job is supposedly so difficult and dangerous (their words,) that you'd think they would want to show the entire world how difficult and dangerous their jobs are. Maybe people would agree with them about increasing their funding instead of calling to defund them if they had video proof of the difficulty and danger in their jobs instead of taking their word for it?
> 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.
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 privacy or safety or whatever other reasons they want to make up and they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you.
There won't be a lie they can spin because they won't have any justification for attacking a cameraman. Note I also said may and spoke of probabilities. Furthermore, I admitted it's only a partial solution so I'm not sure what gotcha you're going for here. I know it's not foolproof or perfect, it's merely better than what we currently have.
Cops can get away with literally shooting you in the back. Even outside qualified immunity cops can get away with a lot of things that are technically illegal. If it's a matter of testimony and it's five cops saying one thing and you saying something else, your chances aren't great.
But they already do that. There have already been cases of cops in the US arresting people for filming them. Not to mention cops have literally attacked journalists (not just "citizen journalists" but actual TV crews) at protests and destroyed their equipment.
You're saying this like the laws aren't different in other countries without these issues arising. It's reasonable to argue that a police officer on duty is exempt from the expectation of privacy and indeed many such countries have exemptions for police officers on duty.
It's also reasonable to have different expectations of privacy for people "of public interest" (i.e. celebrities, politicians and extremely wealthy business moguls) and indeed many such countries do distinguish between what privacy you can expect as an ordinary individual or someone whose job literally involves having their face frequently appear in public media.
Your response is very American too, by the way: while you are concerned about state oppression (or rather: the ability to record state oppression) I'm concerned about the oppression by both businesses and the state that a complete absence of an expectation of privacy outside well-defined private spaces enables. Specifically it trivial to justify mass surveillance and various forms of harassment.
You absolutely have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve likely never interacted with any antifascists and are only regurgitating what you are fed on the news.
It’s really sad so many people bought this crap narrative delivered by our corporate overlords.
Is that a thing in your country? In America, there are no "militant leftist groups" and all of the armed "militia" "insurrectionist" militant groups are right-wing.
All of the so-called leftists (we have basically zero support for actual leftism) here are just garden variety rioting young adults who dgaf about politics.
Naah, we’ve got the more militant types in a few spots, most notably Seattle. They’re not just figments of the Fox News imagination. To some extent they’re even an inspiration for the right wing militants.
In Canada you can record someone (phone call, in person, etc) if just one party consents to the recording. In other words, if I'm a phone call with someone, even if there are several people on the call, it's NOT illegal for me to record them, as long as I'm a participant in the call. It's called the "one party consent" exception. I have no obligation to ask, or tell the others on the call that I'm recording.
There are legitimate reasons for having one party consent legal. My experience with employer harassment has been that it’s extremely hard to prove discriminatory behavior without being able to record without consent.
In California you can record without consent if you have reasons to suspect a crime is going to be committed. It's not the most straightforward thing to get away with and you should work with a lawyer before you do it to be sure it will be accepted as evidence, but you can totally do it.
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.
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.
There's always the risk of being caught while doing it, or to be exposed that you've done it before the time that you intend to "reveal" it.
So it's better to talk with a laywer and get informed of your options and the risks, and how to go about it, before you do it, not merely before you reveal you did it.
And this kind of thing, trouble with a boss/landlord/etc, is a lot more likely to personally impact the average person than any sort of PV-related scenario. Single party consent is a clear net positive for most people.
It’s such a depressing situation. Steve Huffman got caught red handed making up lies about Apollo’s dev for no reason whatsoever. I wish I was exaggerating.
Every time I try to describe the event, it ends up sounding like low quality flamebait. Yet it’s a complete description of what happened.
He never acknowledged it, either. It was just evil. Usually there are confounding factors or reasons to be on the founder’s side, or to at least see the situation from their point of view. But in this case, it was a blatant lie.
The most charitable explanation I’ve ever been able to think of is “maybe Huffman literally forgot that he misunderstood the Apollo dev because he was so stressed.” But eventually I concluded that requires so much mental gymnastics that I may as well compete at the Olympics. And even in that situation, he should’ve said something.
Huffman was a part of the original YC batch. There were no YC alums before him. This was the era when pg wrote “Don’t be evil”, which was at least a good idea, if not an implicit guideline to all founders. And then this happens a decade and some change later.
Memory can be a funny thing, people repeat stories to themselves to keep memories fresh, but with each retelling the story can shift. "I thought he threatened me but then he clarified that he didn't" could turn into "He seemed to threaten me, but then chickened out when I confronted him" His memory of admitting he made an error could turn into a memory of still feeling threatened but trying to let the Apollo dev save face.
All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance. Maybe. It's hard to give him too much credit since he's already shown himself to be a snake who edits other people's comments and that's certainly not something that could be done by accident. Nonetheless, memory is a funny thing.
> All this is to say that Steve Huffman might not be deliberately lying in this instance.
Huffman has had 26+ days to correct the record. He has done nothing to that end. He made a "potentially career-ending" allegation, which hurt the reputation of the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig.
June 8th: Selig released his side of the story, along with messages which were sent to him from a Reddit employee as well as from moderators engaged in a subsequent call with Reddit:
June 9th (a full 24 hours later): Huffman had the facts, including the recording, which confirmed their mutual understanding. Huffman could have revised his stance there and then. Instead, Huffman doubled down, effectively reiterating the lie through his scare-quote and instead criticized Selig for acting publicly to defend his reputation against Reddit's internal and external slander:
Huffman is the CEO of the Reddit platform and nothing is stopping him from apologizing for making a potentially "potentially career-ending lie" against the developer of Apollo, Christian Selig. He hasn't made a peep on the platform since June 9th.
If it wasn't deliberate, then he's had nearly a month to speak up for the truth. At some point, refusing to correct the record, a lie does become deliberate.
---
Here's TechCrunch's reporting on the situation, if you prefer to hear it from a journalist:
This is an excellent comment — thank you for getting these sources together. I’ve favorited it in case I have to explain the situation to someone again.
Do you happen to know whether the call was with Steve himself, or some other Reddit employee? If it wasn’t Steve, then this whole thing was a giant miscommunication, which I’ve always suspected from the beginning.
Boy it’s nice to feel hopeful about this for once. I really hope it wasn’t Steve.
Steve or not doesn't improve anything about the situation, even worse, since it wouldn't even hurt his ego to apologize on behalf of employee he chose radio silence instead, it just shows the intent is to make third party devs fuck off the platform by whatever means necessary
I read it was another employee, so maybe their impression got miscommunicated and the CEO assumed the worst - except without any evidence. Which is still bad behavior given that he hasn't addressed the recording evidence publicly. IIRC he Kafkaesquely accused the very act of recording as evidence of aggression/blackmailing, which is just totally out to lunch IMO.
Unfortunately what sealed it for me was Steve’s response during his followup AMA when someone asked him about the Apollo dev. He said that the dev often said one thing and did another. Christian (the dev) called him out on it and said “I give you permission to name a single time this has happened.” No response.
In other words, Steve doubled down yet again and tried to do the same damn thing after he was caught. Why lie like this?
A developer’s reputation is their most important asset. What Steve did (or tried to do, till the phone conversation proved otherwise) was simply awful.
> maybe Huffman literally forgot that he misunderstood the Apollo dev
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the person on the call wasn't Huffman himself. Selig was talking to some Reddit employee, who presumably then told Huffman about the call.
It's possible that the employee who talked to Selig didn't 100% accurately describe what was said in the call (because he didn't have a transcript to check what was said), and then Huffman misunderstood whatever the employee said further to come up with the blackmail accusation.
I thought the call was with Steve himself. If this is true, it changes everything.
Would anyone mind checking? My wife and I have been in the hospital for a month, and it’s 2am here. Their voices and mannerisms sounded similar and I always assumed it was Steve.
If it wasn’t Steve, then I’ll immediately reverse my opinion. The evildoer was the employee.
I looked it up, Selig said it was an employee [1]:
> As mentioned in the last post, thankfully I recorded the phone call and can show this to be false, to the extent that Reddit even apologized four times for misinterpreting it:
> Reddit: "That's a complete misinterpretation on my end. I apologize. I apologize immediately."
> (Note: as Steve declined to ever talk on a call, the call is with a Reddit representative)
I just want to thank you for leaving your comment. It’s a rare experience to have my opinion shifted so dramatically due to a crucial missing piece of info. People will say that Steve is still at fault — and he is — but intent was the crucial part of it for me. Being foolish is infinitely better than being evil, and I just couldn’t see how Steve making up a lie was anything but evil.
He didn’t lie. He was misinformed.
Steve is still making questionable choices, but thank god he’s not who I thought he was. I was about to give up on pg’s original vision of YC and conclude that it must’ve all been a grift, just like the peanut gallery has been saying all along.
Really. Thanks. Have a wonderful week, wherever you are.
He may have originally been misinformed, but instead of apologising, he doubled down and said the call was leaked (in his AMA). Then went right back to repeating the lies in interviews.
From his AMA:
>His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.
It was a different employee than Steve on the call that apparently perpetuated the misunderstanding despite it being cleared up immediately and the employee apologizing; however, Steve continued to repeat the claim after Apollo Dev had refuted and proved the claim false, which the media (such as The Verge) had picked up.
So though it was not originated from Steve, Steve perpetuated it when he should have known better.
> It’s such a depressing situation. Steve Huffman got caught red handed making up lies about Apollo’s dev for no reason whatsoever. I wish I was exaggerating.
B) the dev absolutely was trying to get money out of them. You can't make a demand, then say 'uh, im kinda kidding' repeatedly. If someone held a gun to your head and asked for your wallet multiple times, each time saying they were kinda joking, what would you do?
That said, Huffman et al absolutely shouldn't have aired dirty laundry.
I did listen to it. The dev was calling the Reddit rep's bluff, effectively saying "if Apollo is really costing you so much money, why not just buy it for $cost/2?". He wasn't asking for personal hush money. He clarified this on the call and the rep understood and apologised for misunderstanding. Then Huffman went and publicly claimed the misunderstood version of events
The dev was obviously joking. What part of the recording suggests he wasn't? Exact timestamp please because I want to go back and listen to the context around it on my own rather than relying on your self selected soundbites/quotes.
There's been a miscommunication. I want you to provide the timestamp that makes you think the Apollo dev was serious.
I've listened to the recording and it's obvious he was joking every time he asked for the $10 million. I want to know why you think otherwise and am asking for the exact timestamp where you believe his threat could be interpreted as serious. I honestly have no idea which part of the recording could be interpreted as a serious threat and I don't believe such a timestamp exists, hence my inability to find it.
The apollo dev is based in Canada and recorded the phone calls with Reddit without them knowing. The Apollo dev released transcripts (and perhaps recordings) of the calls to disprove statements made by Reddit.
Has a lawyer weighed in on if this was actually legal? It’s concerning wiretap laws with participants in two different countries, so the legality might not be just “is it legal under Canada law”
If a Canadian, connecting to his Canadian ISP hacks into a computer in the US, if they aren't extradited, I think they should be cautious about traveling to the US.
The law exists to protect the person being recorded, so if the person being recorded is somewhere where the law is in effect, then it can be applied.
There is case-law supporting something similar within the US at least: if a person in e.g. California (where all parties' consent is needed) is recorded by a person in e.g. Virginia (where only one party's consent is needed) then they have violated the California law.
I don’t think recording and hacking are equivalent.
Recording is a passive act that entirely takes place entirely within the territory of the person doing the recording.
Whereas hacking involves accessing a computer system that is in a different jurisdiction, which necessarily involves actively communicating with it and sending it commands.
Recording a call is more like listening to a radio station. Countries may make it illegal to listen to certain communications, but as soon as those radio waves leave that jurisdiction then they are fair game for anyone who wants to listen to them.
Pretty much everybody should be cautious about entering the US!
Legally because the recording takes place entirely in Canada. For practical purposes getting something prosecuted across national borders is incredibly complicated even for serious crimes that are crimes in both nations with clear jurisdiction and basically impossible beyond that scope.
In fact only an American would have the temerity to imagine that their laws might apply to someone in another country merely by calling them on the phone.
Good luck trying to record a phone call on any modern smartphone. They purposely make it nearly impossible, unless you want to use speakerphone and the analog hole.
And while it might feel counterintuitive how obvious a good idea it is, it becomes a lot more intuitive when you consider the contrary implications. You can not only be a party to something without being able to demonstrate what you observed, but you can be a party to something where any convincing accusation about your own involvement is equally compelling to your own recount by default. Even if you don’t realize you’re a party to anything in particular.
Being able to record your own experience is a matter of basic autonomy and self defense. Being denied it is a gift to anyone with the power or motivation to exploit that.
Edit: I didn’t even look at who was involved in the case. I am not remotely surprised to find the ruling favors political opponents, and I’m not swayed by that either. If anything, it’s better for everyone if PV has to play by the same rules as anyone they’re interacting with.
In the US the only function of two party consent laws is to allow people to lie about what they said. Even in two party consent states you can still report what someone said to you. And they can lie and say no I never said that. Without recordings it's just one person's word against the other's.
I interpret the "surprisingly" as shocked that that many have common sense one party consent rules. My skepticism would think idiotic rules to be the majority.
From my (European) perspective this sounds strange. Wouldn't you be worried when e.g. your employer or partner is secretly recording your conversations with them? In Canada it seems to be even legal to publish these conversations without consent, though I don't know about the US.
Publishing is a whole other thing, but why should I be worried that someone is recording what I'm saying, in general?
And if I'm discussing sensitive information (say, I'm discussing an extra-marital affair, or illegal conduct), why should I think I can rely on the law to protect me from the recording? Is my marriage less ruined if the recording was illegally made and illegally presented to my spouse?
> Publishing is a whole other thing, but why should I be worried that someone is recording what I'm saying, in general?
Well, this reminds me of
> You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
The phrase - widely used in discussions of Internet security - is most commonly attributed to Joseph Goebbels in 1933. You probably agree with that statement while I have different intuitions.
> why should I think I can rely on the law to protect me from the recording?
Why should you think the law can protect you from anything? Because violating the law comes with a substantial potential cost, which is a risk many actors are not willing to take.
> You probably agree with that statement while I have different intuitions.
I most certainly do not. That phrase has nothing to do with this discussion in fact - it applies to cases of making private statements either public or at least known to the state apparatus.
Private recordings of private conversations have no similar issue. In my opinion, recording a conversation you and I have is no different from keeping hold of a letter or an email that you sent me, and it's certainly not something I routinely fear.
And, when I do say things that I fear others may hear, I am not content with the fact that I could sue you for recording that information. I would go to technical lengths to actually try to ensure that you can't record it.
> Why should you think the law can protect you from anything? Because violating the law comes with a substantial potential cost, which is a risk many actors are not willing to accept.
The law has almost no power in private settings. Technically, if I bought a music CD from Sony, I am not allowed to play it to you, since that would require performance rights. Does Sony or anyone on the planet expect me to fear legal repercussions for doing so in the privacy of my home? Obviously not. It will only even become a possible legal issue if I start publicizing this in some way.
Similarly, even if it's technically illegal for me to hold recordings of my conversations with friends, it is in practice all but impossible for me to be prosecuted about it unless and until I publish them. Even if you suspected I did record our conversations, you would need significant proof of that before convincing a judge to issue a search warrant to try to prove I did. If I am simply keeping these for my own purposes and not sharing with others, you will never have such proof. So, even if it were deeply illegal, I would have very little reason to fear it in practice.
It's kind of relevant though. Germany had a very bad experiences with being spied on by gestapo informants. After the war, East Germany had a secret service, the Stasi, which massively spied on its citizens. Phone calls were routinely listened to, and countless informants collected information about people they were close to. Trust was a rare commodity. Americans (luckily) never had the experience of living in an authoritarian surveillance state, where everyone could be suspected to spy on you. So it not surprising surveillance isn't taken so lightly today as in the US.
Oregon, where this is filed, also has one-party consent on phone calls. Considering the plaintiff, this is mostly about hidden cameras and surreptitious recording in person.
There are lots of other types of phones besides mobile phones (nowadays, usually implying VoIP somewhere in most places, but some countries still have analog landlines, too). Assuming that all phone calls are either made with Android or iOS is reductive to say the least...
This notably surround James O'Keefe's Project Veritas recording people, as the plaintiff suing the state.
The dissenting opinion here is somewhat long to reposte, but seems worthy, in my view:
> Dissenting, Judge Christen stated that because the majority does not dispute that the State has a significant interest in protecting the privacy of Oregonians who engage in conversations without notice that their comments are being recorded, the court’s analysis should be straightforward. First, principles of federalism require that the panel begin from a premise of reluctance to strike down a state statute. Next, following Supreme Court precedent, the panel should sever the two statutory exceptions [ed: felony endangering human lives, activities of police officers] that Project Veritas challenges, apply intermediate scrutiny to the content-neutral remainder, recognize that the statute is well- tailored to meet Oregon’s significant interest, and uphold section 165.540(1)(c) as a reasonable time, place, or manner restriction. Judge Christen stated that the purpose Oregon advances is its significant interest in protecting participants from having their oral conversations recorded without their knowledge. The majority recasts the State’s interest as one in “protecting people’s conversational privacy from the speech of other individuals.” That reframing of the legislature’s purpose serves as the springboard for the majority’s reliance on an inapplicable line of Supreme Court authority that pertains to state action aimed at protecting people from unwanted commercial or political speech, not protection from speech-gathering activities like Project Veritas’s, which are qualitatively different because they appropriate the speech of others.
I wonder to what extent repeal might happen. Do the judges who struck this down intend to, in the absence of law, now allow 0 party consent recording? Can I just go around planting bugs around the city & start recording as many people as I can, unbeknownst to them?
I'd forgotten that Federal law's 1 party consent is as extensive as it is, & hadn't included that above. That is an important consideration.
To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about states creating their own privacy laws. Part of me agrees, that 1 party consent is probably all that's required, and to do more creates a danger that criminal activity can use the law to protect itself.
Oregon did exempt two specific classes of speech: any speech talking about a felony that endangers human life, and any speech by police officers. This gives the public some right to 1 party record really bad things.
What's so weird here is that the court used those exemptions to strike down the entire law. They said that since the law discriminates, since these people aren't protected, it jeopardizes their right to speech. And they used that to invalidate all of the state's attempt to create additional privacy for citizens. I'm not sure how I feel on 2 party consent entirely, but this seemed like an attempt to create a somewhat balanced, privacy-sensitive approach, and seeing it taken down like this makes me feel embarrassed for the courts, that the federal courts would so brazenly & broadly undo the state legislature. I'm undecided about 2 part consent, but this feels like a vicious stroke by the courts.
That already exists - it’s called a video camera on almost every public area. Recording in public areas, unless the owner prohibits it, is almost always legal.
This primarily concerned individuals. Two people couldn’t meet and secretly record a conversation with the other without consent. Recording a private conversation you are personally involved in, without notification, is legal in almost all states.
Notably most video cameras don't include audio. Because it's a legal liability & it's simply easier to prove your camera cant record audio than to have a feature that's disabled. Audio recording is incredibly un-popular. But yes, still, in quite a number of states it's possible to go around putting audio recordings in public. 0 party consent in public.
But even that's not what Veritas did at all. They went into private offices of other people & secretly recorded conservations. People being asked questions thought they were dealing with crazy people & were afraid for their safety, they have testified. Giles dressed as a prostitute & O'Keefe semi-claimed to be a boyfriend, and walked into offices in 7 states (and DC) and pressured staff into talking about illegal businesses. They did as much as they could to, while secretly recording, get people to say bad things. One person being attacked like swore under oath that they feared for their safety & were scared. One said they thought it was a joke. One of them played along, feeling sorry for Giles who said she was being injured by her pimp, and then called the police because she was propositioned about setting up under-age sex trade operations. This farce brought down one of the biggest international collectivist organization on the planet, by ambushing these people with secret recordings & cherry picking the worst things to hurt them with.
This whole case is about people recording each other in private. That's the whole purpose of this law: to defend against assault by advanced persistent Vertias like aggressor threats (and lower/simpler forms of scummery).
Veritas wasn't the problem here. The problem here is that Democrats basically accepted the narrative because it was politically convenient at the time, even as everybody knew exactly what had happened. Didn't matter.
While ACORN was a heavily Democratic organization, it wasn't a party front like so many nonprofits have become. Democrats that didn't do anything for people had trouble with ACORN, and they were glad to get rid of them. Democratic congresspeople eventually joined in, and their outlets ran cover for them destroying a grassroots community organization. Definitely one of the largest in the country of that type, if not in the history of the modern US.
Blaming it on O'Keefe is easy. I wish Democrats would stop using their failures as explicit justifications for limitations on civil liberties.
There's definitely a lot of truth here & valuable perspective.
Given what a sensationalistic heavily spun story the other side of the media was rolling with, it is a bit hard to imagine who is going to step up & grab the third rail to make a case here. The whole story starts & ends with selectively chosen soundbites being used to wreck & ruin a name, and signing up to be the next target in this kind of a sniper war is terrifying; even if you can form ranks it's unclear that your constituents won't see only the worst-most spun forms of your defense. It's a problem with democracy in general that nuance & perspective don't convey nearly as well, are much harder cases to build than attention grabbing soundbites.
I can definitely appreciate the value of 1 part federal consent laws, as enabling folks to help bring to light the bad in this world. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant & all that. That this was such murky shit doesn't really change that basis. Still, it's quite disappointing to see what seems, to me, like such an off-base & illegitimate Federal ruling used to so broadly undermine State legislature. Using the fact that this law allowed recording of the police & felonies endangering human life as the sole basis - because that's discriminatory - to say it's unfair & entirely has to be ended seems absurd.
It's true, and I agree with how you weigh these crimes by parties against the public & discourse.
But. Different parties each have their own interest & angles for why they un-rightfully squeeze liberties in different ways. It's fine to point out flaws, to identify greater evils. But we have to resist what-about-ism as a complete counter; everyone can be guilty of the same classes of errors. It doesn't win elections, but the moral high ground of acknowledging nuance & complexity & being willing to be vulnerable is, to me, the mark of genuineness that is the highest form of patriotism.
Reality is rarely clean, and that willingness to acknowledge the muddiness of the world & it's many situations is what enables us to iterate & progress.
Seems like serious overstatement to say "[Project Veritas] brought down the biggest international collectivist organization on the planet" if you're referring to [the national US branch of] ACORN.
They did cause the national US ACORN organization to be dissolved [0], but individual US state orgs (CA, NY etc.) continue [1], new organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, and non-US orgs continue unaffected.
I don't even know that ACORN was the "biggest international collectivist organization on the planet", certainly not one very cohesive organization.
As to "This whole case is about people recording each other in private", it's not about mere random invasion of privacy or prurience, O'Keefe/Veritas did try to claim a public-interest journalistic defense.
This is somewhat off topic but does any of this apply to sign language? Is there a lesser expectation of privacy since "anyone" can see it, so it's treated like a video recording? Is there any conflict with disability laws?
I'd love to have a totally crystal clear source telling how incredibly viciously sadly Vertias ambushed people. I scanned around some, and one Timbah.On.Truth has a >2 hour 2-part series seemingly going through what evidence we have of what really happened. (Apologies, still unvetted, but it's the best tone/balance & most contentful I've seen so far & running out of time to dig for this.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8buQLy1dWD8
But as for how this incident was landed / portrayed, what a spectacle it made at the time: Rachel Maddow's coverage is short & shows how it was bandihooed across Fox News. This was like a major spectacle in right-wing American media for a considerably long time, and it's hard to underemphasize how heavily Fox & others worked with O'Keefe to sell this manufactured story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0B0wxt3XYc
I do want to point out, we never got most of the footage. There are many many hours, perhaps even days of footage & audio O'Keefe & Giles recorded doing this sort of stuff, trying to cause trouble. They spent an enormous amount of time trying to generate soundbytes. Also notably, never once was anyone of any supervisor or leadership position taken by these bits; all the juicy sound-bytes O'Keefe got were from pretty low level employees, of an organization with over 1200 neighborhood chapters in the US.
Edit: I misread “legal” as “illegal” in the last sentence.
Aren’t most states single-party consent? I know mine is, for which I’m grateful. I regularly record “private conversations” with state officials after having had incidents with them.
This needs to be clarified as I think some people will misunderstand. Oregon is a one party consent state for phone conversations. The all-party consent only applies to in person.
In Washington you don't need the other parties' consent (in the lay sense of the word) if you announce that you are recording and they continue talking. RCW 9.73.030 (3):
> Where consent by all parties is needed pursuant to this chapter, consent shall be considered obtained whenever one party has announced to all other parties engaged in the communication or conversation, in any reasonably effective manner, that such communication or conversation is about to be recorded or transmitted
This smells like a pickle that SCOTUS will need to address.
Just running it through my head and I feel like I could argue it in every direction… and the details of the case here make for some interesting wrinkles and a lot of second order type effects that could occur without some good guidance here.
In general, SCOTUS wouldn't tend to pick this up unless another circuit has ruled the other way (in which case, yeah, they generally would to prevent unequal application of the law in different states).
The simple approach is to default to single party consent but allow explicit nonconsent. In other words nobody can be recorded without their knowledge, but if they’re informed a recording is being made then remaining in the conversation is consent.
Strongly disagree. There are so many situations in which abusive people (employers, romantic partners, politicians) need to be caught unaware or they won't be caught at all.
Obviously there are lines to be drawn when we are talking about the government recording citizens. Warrants are an important check on power for this. But any individual should be able to record (mostly) anything. At the very least, it can save you money when a customer service rep claims they never said something. At most, it can keep you out of prison.
In many cases, the act of recording is itself an abusive action. Privacy is valuable, desirable, and the freedom to converse knowing there isn’t a recording running is itself the freedom to speak without all conversations being subject to chilling effects. Society is not improved by the threat that every ephemeral conversation is potentially being collected for later use, abuse, and scrutiny.
This therefore to me seems like a thinly-veiled variant on “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. A world of constant recording is not a better one.
Corporations are people, so Amazon is a person, and if you invite Amazon into your home then they can record a conversation heard across the fence into someone else's yard.
That isn’t single party consent it is all party consent. Single party consent is anyone in the conversation may record without telling others about it. Or a third party may record with the approval of any one who is in the conversation.
> 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.
Who cares who the plaintiff was? If they operate in bad faith, so much the better[0]. I'd be inclined to see this decision as a boon to progressive organizations wanting to expose hypocritical conduct. Again, this applies in places with no expectation of privacy.
On general principle, it seems like a no-brainer. I get being disappointed if your ox is gored, but being recorded by your interlocutor in a public place where anyone else could record shouldn't be a problem for any individual or organization that adheres to its stated principles. I'm more disturbed that this is somehow perceived as an attack against progressive organizations, when frankly it should be celebrated as a powerful tool to expose covert discrimination and other wrongdoing.
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.
In the sense that it implies neutrality. This group of people is highly partisan and carefully cuts out context from their video recordings in order to slander their targets.
Their expectation of neutrality probably stems from the word 'journalism'. I'd say that the expectation of neutral journalism is a (commonish) fallacy, though.
Unbiased, neutral, objective reporting is a great ideal and aspiration for those who fancy themselves journalists. But that doesn't mean it could be 100% achieved. The very nature of reporting means that you need to make editorial decisions about which stories are newsworthy and salient. We probably don't need to know how many hairs were on the Senator's head as he gave his speech. Different people will make different choices about which details are important and those choices will inevitably be colored/informed by the things that're important to those making the editorial choices.
As much as it'd be nice if we could somehow fix it, bias affects everything. Even institutions which we hold sacred like education, jurisprudence, science, statesmanship, etc. are all irrevocably tainted. What's especially interesting about the media, though, is that it comes with a megaphone.
The medium is the message: "The most trusted name in news", "Fair and Balanced". Where the self-promotion is repeated often enough, it's particularly easy for people start believing it--at least about their favored side. Every other outlet produces nothing but salacious, yellow, muckraking tabloid-esque sound-bites but 'journalism' is as pure as the wind-driven snow.
You can't apply the term 'journalism' to a real, human organization unless it's one of the organizations that I like. Otherwise, you're implying neutrality where none exists.
Mocking a politician is protected political speech. Complaining that the politician you support has been mocked violates the no-politics rule here. Your understanding of what's allowed is completely backwards.
One comment mentioned slander, which is illegal. Project Veritas in the past has committed slander, and lost the resulting defamation suit.
The response mentioned neutrality with regards to mocking Trump with an out of context video, which is protected political speech. It seems they're equating two instances of media reporting out of context, and saying that the response to those media outlets is not neutral. But they're not equivalent because one instance is illegal, and the other is protected. So I don't see where we'd need to apply neutrality in the first place.
My take is that SeanLuke quoted a contentious description of PV's activities. wnevets said the description was an outright lie. ifyoubuildit asked for details. rootusrootus responded that the description implied neutrality, and said they aren't neutral because they target and slander one side particularly. sourcegrift gave an example of other media not being neutral. Then you said that media aren't obliged to be neutral.
Slander was only relevant insofar as the slander evidenced a lack of neutrality. But the lack of neutrality was never truly relevant in the first place; rootusrootus erred when he said the description quoted by SeanLuke implied PV is neutral. BurningFrog and streamer25 were correct in pointing this out. Describing PV as journalism doesn't imply neutrality, nor does anything else in that contentious description.
You also erred when you assumed sourcegrift considers mockery to be slander. From the context of the conversation, I think it's clear that sourcegrift considered the mockery to be evidence that the rest of the media lacks neutrality; in other words sourcegrift was correctly disputing the supposed contradiction between partisanship and journalism. Journalists aren't neutral; journalists mocking people with plain partisan bias demonstrates this.
So? Police departments manipulate video all the time. Does that mean we should be against having cops wearing body cams? Isn't having the public right to document things at least the greater good?
I don't understand what principle you're defending. Everyone is recorded in public all the time; if you want to stop that, it's a whole different set of laws. If the Starbucks CCTV camera can record it, but you can be arrested for recording it, that's a massive infringement on your rights[0]. You're OK with abolishing the right of people to record just because some right wing group splices video to make people look bad?
A redditor made a gif Trump hitting CNN with a chair in a wrestling ring, or something to that effect. It was subsequently tweeted by Trump. CNN tracked the gif back to the redditor that made the gif and threatened to go public with his identity and reddit comment history if he didn't issue an apology (which he did).
I think the lesson is something about picking fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.
It was investigative journalism, if you can call it journalism. CNN investigated the origin of the gif, and used biographical details revealed on reddit to determine the gif creators real name / identity. They didn't ruin his life, but threatened to go public with information which probably would have.
The kinds of money this "non-profit" org gets is almost like they're getting funded covertly from foreign states, looking to interfere with american politics.
Banning recording private conversations without consent by one of the conversation members was always weird to me because of the “chilling effect” it has in people’s minds about recording perfectly legal things, or potential criminal behavior. Do I really want to record that domestic incident for use in a divorce later? What if it backfires? Should I really record my boss saying that? What if there’s a 20% chance it backfires? Etc.
>Banning recording private conversations without consent by one of the conversation members was always weird to me because of the “chilling effect” it has in people’s minds about recording perfectly legal things, or potential criminal behavior
I've never liked or thought 2-party consent requirements made sense because it felt like an extremely overly broad restriction on our own potential memories, discrimination based on mental ability, and with negative implication for future prosthetics. Like, why should someone with a photographic memory inherently have a right to have better recollection of their own personal interactions then someone with memory loss problems who wants to use a life log so they can go back over the day later? What about future implants and such? I'd much prefer if the law was more fine grained and focused on the negative edges. Like, perhaps consent would be required for sharing with the general public in cases not of public interest (in the legally defined sense), or that if one wanted to share any snippets the other party could demand the complete recording be shared as well. Or there could be technical requirements, like all future recording hardware must time stamp and cryptographically sign each frame so that any alteration is trivial to detect. Basically go after worries of "cherry picking" specifically. There could be specific protections for highly sensitive conversations like medical, or to address power imbalances (clients/customers/patients vs service providers).
But giving any party to a conversation a total universal veto over anyone else having a personal record by default never felt right and I'm glad I don't live in one of those states. After all, everyone can (and does!) demand NDAs or the like as they wish.
Yeah I was thinking this kind of ban only passed because too many government officials were being caught saying some shit on tape and once it is illegal to have recorded it then it’s no longer valid evidence.
> Does not being able to use violence any time you choose have a chilling effect on using it when it is legally justified?
Actually, sometimes, yes; from both homeowners and occasionally Police, despite their reputation, with sometimes deadly consequences. You are afraid to pull the trigger if you have no idea what the jury will think.
However, there is a difference in that the use of violence to defend yourself is more or less the same in all states, give or take Castle doctrine. Oregon and a few others are unique.
But I would like to add, because your analogy is so strained, violence is not speech.
> Does not being able to use violence any time you choose have a chilling effect on using it when it is legally justified?
It can, as can literally any law when you're brushing up into the boundaries of a gray area.
The principal question is:
"Do we want to live in a society where violence is usually allowed?" - Definitely not.
"Do we want to live in a society where recording people without their consent is usually allowed?" - Maybe? Depends on who you ask. Unlike violence, our social mores consider this almost entirely to be a gray area.
No, we want the state to allow some types of violence (e.g. boxing matches) but prohibit even the state from other types of violence like torture even from the state.
That’s not even true, though. Captains of commercial ships have always had the authority to put people in the brig. And that’s not even including putting Elon and Zuck in a cage together.
Elon/Zuck entering a physical cage with consent and able to leave is not "caging". Like calling waterboarding legal because surfers use a board on water.
Brig detainment is a state sanctioned and regulated method to hand over someone to the state in transit back to authorities. They're not allowed to detain people as punishment
So violence is okay as long as enough people voted for it? A reminder that Hitler was democratically elected; there's a reason the US is formally a Republic.
> So violence is okay as long as enough people voted for it?
Sure, how else would you stop a violent threat to society? Say, a chap who starts shooting up a mall? Or a foreign invader?
I mean, if you're an unconditional pacifist, who believes that violence should never be used, even in response to violence, I can understand that position, even if I don't agree with it. But it doesn't sound like you are.
Most Concealed/Carry Firearms courses discuss this very area. When can you brandish a weapon? when can you show you have it without brandishing? When can you use it? Its so complex, I choose to not carry in my state most of the time because of the opportunity for mistake, and therefore possible prosecution of gray area laws that mostly hinge on a prosecutor choosing or not choosing to proceed.
That’s not the situation here. This is about whether I can record my romantic partner when I am in a private conversation with her, not in public, without her consent.
Or, your boss, without him suing you for recording a private comment about making the office whiter.
> The law provides two exceptions relevant to this appeal: (1) section 165.540(1)(c) does not apply to a person who records a conversation during a felony that endangers human life, Or. Rev. Stat § 165.540(5)(a); and (2) section 165.540(1)(c) allows a person to record a conversation in which a law enforcement officer is a participant if the recording is made while the officer is performing official duties and meets other criteria.
iPhone is (unsurprisingly) more “locked down” as in you can’t record with the default phone app but they don’t block phone recording apps from their app store either which is better than nothing considering the (foolish) stance apple could take here.
As an outsider (European), I don't understand the reasoning for the dissenting opinion; I read it as: "you have a right, granted by the US Constitution (1A), but if the state has an interest that is in conflict with that right then you no longer have the right and this is fine". It asks the question "how is that right guaranteed?" if the State believes it is fine to revoke it.
As I see, there is no clause in 1A saying: this right is valid only if the state does not have a different opinion. Free speech is free even if you cry "Fire!" in a theater, but not if the state has other plans?
Btw, in Europe I think there is no country with free speech rights. My country has it in the Constitution, but it is cancelled by the next paragraph saying "it can be limited by law" (any law), so it practically means nothing as the laws should respect the Constitution, not to restrict it.
Say it was possible to sit in a large public park and record every conversation within it. Would this decision mean that the state would be unable to ban the use of such technology?
That was already true; you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place, and never have. I can legally video and audio record anything I wish in a public park.
I'd be interested to see how a court interprets that given technology that allows discreet remote recording. E.g. you might have to reasonably expect that the guy next to you on the bus could be wearing a wire, but what if someone has a powerful enough microphone that they can record quiet conversations at similar distances to a telephoto lens? I'm unsure what the current actual availability of such technology is, but I'm suggesting it for the sake of argument
Or what if you've hidden a microphone on a secluded bench, and record a conversation where the subjects reasonably believe there is no one around for 20 metres? Consider that businesses put up "you're on CCTV" signs for a reason. A lot of the reason is deterrence, but depending on the jurisdiction it's sometimes considered a legal necessity (or at least prudent) to make the subject aware of the recording, even in a private space
As has been pointed out approximately a billion times, technology has made surveillance possible to an extent that was inconceivable back in the founders' time.
Before sound recording technology, if there was no-one else around and had a whispered conversation with another person in a public park, I have a reasonable expectation that the conversation is private.
Fast forward to, say, 1980. While it's technically possible for law enforcement to record that conversation (with a dish microphone or through employing a lip-reader and binoculars) the resources required to do so are such that it's very rarely used.
But what about 2023? Or, better still, 2033? Let's imagine it's technically possible for me to stand in the middle of said park with a recording device and intelligibly record every conversation within a 500-yard radius. Would this be considered acceptable? Should governments have the ability to prohibit or restrict the use of such devices, even in public places?
I think it's an interesting question, but perhaps it's the wrong approach to even try to answer it? Perhaps it's better to consider what happens TO the recording.
Being obviously recorded (paparazzi) is the case when the recording itself feels like it is infringing my privacy. If I don't know, and the recording is piped to /dev/null then I can't really care? But if the recording is kept too long, or published somewhere, then that's when I might care. So perhaps we should focus on what's being done to the recorded material. Compare to how in most legislations (afaik) it's ok for me to snap a picture of someone who happens to be in my view when I snap a picture of the Eiffel Tower. And I can publish that on my blog without permission. BUT if I want to sell it as a stock photo or use it in a commercial then I need explicit consent from the people in the picture. I think this makes perfect sense from a consent perspective.
I didn't know this was true until a neckbeard got some closeups of a yoga girl doing yoga in a public area. He wasn't hiding it either, he was outright vocal about what he was doing.
Beta AF, but it was interesting to think that if recording in a public park was legal, what else is legal.
I do this when calling help lines for companies. I tell the first person I get that I will be recording the call. 9 out of 10 times I am immediately transferred to someone else who ends up being far more knowledgable than tier 1 support.
Which is only 5 states: Alaska, Kentucky, Montana, Massachusetts and Oregon.
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2023/07/03/2...