My kids are in elementary and middle school and there was an occasion where they were at a birthday party where an older sibling was live streaming the event.
Both my kids (and me) found it very off-putting, so there's some anecdata that at least some young kids still feel it's an invasion of privacy.
There are lots of young people who have some conception and respect of privacy and there are people who haven't. That's not a generational thing.. It's just that those without awareness of boundaries have now all the tech that screams in their face to stream everything to the world without consent. I can assure you that still lots of young folks are annoyed by those people.
Agree. I went to a family gathering recently, and my wife's cousin was walking around live streaming. People were pissed once they figured out that private conversations were uploading live to the internet.
The same guy did similar when his mom was on her death bed. Jesus Christ.
That's a good recipe for getting a black eye. The mother-to-be tends to be pretty much confined to her immediate affairs, but the partner…
(I'm sure everyone is different, but I've been there as the father-to-be, and I would have made a good effort of turning that live-stream into a live-colonoscopy.)
>The same guy did similar when his mom was on her death bed. Jesus Christ.
I am so sorry for your loss and I am out of words. Just, I just want to be with ya in silence for a while. I am sorry that you had to go through this. I am really speechless
I was definitely feeling something as I didn't think of the stranger's wife's cousin's mother? as dying but rather the stranger's wife dying and that cousin recording it.
But even now, yes you may have proved your point but death is so fucking weird and not talked about and sometimes I just get speechless, like someone just left the earth, let that sink in...
Honestly, I can somewhat both understand why he was live streaming now wanting more comments/everyone's final messages to go to her mother but at the same time, its definitely privacy invasive and might show their last moments and something of a behaviour I don't condone but I just don't know, now my opinion is mixed.
I didn't know the lady at all. I didn't even end up meeting the cousin, I heard about all this after the fact. My wife isn't broken up either - kind of distant family.
I get that for whistleblowers, journalists, investigators, ... I don't think it's relevant for a birthday party with children.
If it's me, I'm leaving the party. If it's my children attending, I'm strongly recommending them to leave the party (or just leave with them, depending on their age). Live-streaming a birthday party of children is obnoxious behavior that should not be tolerated.
This is the case where I find law in Europe better than USA. In germany you need consent to film or record other people.
The downside is the misuse of the law, what happens constantly, to basically prohibit (at least in practice) ANY recording activity. Is not unheard of, I have seen and experienced myself quite a few times, for example, a tourist being stopped and asked to delete a video of a simple recording in a park (police called immediately), because a random stupid person was around and wants to show how good he knows his rights… (see sister comment)
If it’s me, in Germany, I would instantly tell this person to stop filming and to delete any recordings. And if they streamed live to expect a letter from the (German equivalent of the) DA soon, as I would - as soon as back home - I would press charges and search damages.
Because in German publishing images/recordings of an individual without consent violates basic constitutional rights. And that’s nothing to f** with.
If minors were involved you’d be in a whole different can of soup even.
So while I don’t advocate for violence - as others have hinted in this thread - a black eye could actually be the lesser negative outcome for such a person.
And most states also allow you to leave a bar thirty seconds after your friend you arranged to meet there arrives, it would still be considered rude to do so and probably you wouldn’t be welcome in the future if you kept doing it.
Under US federal law one-party consent requires that you actually be a party to the conversation. This is why most security cameras do not record audio.
If you're wandering around livestreaming and picking up conversations you're not a participant in, it's a violation of federal wiretapping laws.
I watched multiple videos from Portland ICE protest, multiple videos of ICE arresting people, all with audio. Half the people at protests are recording.
If you were right all that would be illegal.
The magic word is: "reasonable expectation of privacy".
If you're in public, like in streets, in the mall etc. you don't have reasonable expectation of privacy. You can be recorded, with audio, and it's legal.
The two party consent rules only apply to private conduct e.g. you have a phone conversation. In states with two party consent the other person can't record the conversation without notifying you.
What you describe as "US federal law" sound more like anti-wiretapping law i.e. I can't plant a bug in your house and record your conversations. Which is duh, but not relevant to being recorded while in public.
I figured that "reasonable expectation of privacy" was a given in the scenario. It's a family gathering, the livestreamer is not being obvious about their recording, there's a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Your ICE protest example is performed in public, its a protest, its not meant to be private, thus fails the test of "reasonable expectation of privacy". Action taken by agents of the state are also public actions, this has been tried many times in court.
Two-party consent is not federal law and varies state-by-state. But again it requires that you actually be a party to consent.
And yes by "US Federal Law" I am referencing the anti-wiretapping laws which prohibit, among other things, interception of oral communication via electronic means unless at least one party consents.
I'm not so sure that the family gathering scenario is well-defined, though. If I'm at a gathering in someone's house, and I'm in a room with only the person/people that I'm actively talking to, then I feel reasonably private in the sense that my words are falling only on the ears of intended recipients. But if I'm in a room with the people I'm talking to and also people I'm not talking to, then I acknowledge that ears beyond those involved in the conversation can catch wind of what I'm saying, which roughly equates to the absense of expectations of privacy.
It's important to remember that you're making this up. You're just sort of spontaneously interpreting "reasonable expectation of privacy" off the top of your head.
It's usually simpler than that: if you see them recording you, and if they aren't trespassing (i.e. breaking the law otherwise); or you are on their property or on public property that they are legally permitted to use, which carries a posted sign telling you that you may be recorded, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Otherwise you do.*
Somebody could possibly hear something has nothing to do with it. Consenting to being heard is not consenting to being recorded. But maintaining your presence in a place where people are allowed to record is. If it's your party, tell them to put it away or leave. If it's their party, you leave. If you are recording surreptitiously and you are not working with law enforcement, it's probably not going to be admissible in court and if you publish it, you're going to get sued. Depending on your state and local laws, you are likely to lose badly.
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[*] All of this depending specifically on how the term is defined in your state and local laws. For example, video has often been separated from audio for pragmatic reasons; security cameras are meant to record physical acts, not conversations. For a second example, many states have decided that sending your voice over a wire to a designated recipient as an electronic signal is already consenting for the person receiving that signal to be able to record it and use it as they please; others have not. For a rationale in the second case, imagine that you didn't have the right to reveal a letter that was sent to you.
If everyone is inside a private home, the host has not given permission to stream, and the streamer is deliberately keeping the camera/phone hidden, then no-one has waived their expectation of privacy, and the streamer is intercepting a conversation they are not a party to
> If you're in public, like in streets, in the mall etc. you don't have reasonable expectation of privacy. You can be recorded, with audio, and it's legal.
Just a note because I myself made the same argument very loudly 1-3 weeks ago...and was informed some states have different laws than I expected. Massachusetts, in particular.
(Note that MA limits clandestine recording, not the obvious recording in TFA blog about airsoft -- and it has been neither upheld nor overturned by SCOTUS)
>>> Massachusetts makes it a crime to secretly record a conversation, whether the conversation is in-person or taking place by telephone or another medium. See Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99. Accordingly, if you are operating in Massachusetts, you should always inform all parties to a telephone call or conversation that you are recording, unless it is absolutely clear to everyone involved that you are recording (i.e., the recording is not "secret"). Under Massachusetts's wiretapping law, if a party to a conversation is aware that you are recording and does not want to be recorded, it is up to that person to leave the conversation.
>>> This law applies to secret video recording when sound is captured. In a 2007 case, a political activist was convicted of violating the wiretapping statute by secretly recording video of a Boston University police sergeant during a political protest in 2006. The activist was shooting footage of the protest when police ordered him to stop and then arrested him for continuing to operate the camera while hiding it in his coat. As part of the sentencing, the court ordered the defendant to remove the footage from the Internet. From this case, it appears that you can violate the statute by secretly recording, even when you are in a public place.
Wiretapping laws are set by states, and different states have different criteria. For example, the two-party consent in MA involves 'intercepting' the conversation so even listening on a microphone and not recording it is considered wiretapping, but not all states use that criteria. Some people, like public officials performing their duty in public-- e.g. cops and politicians-- can't have any expectation of privacy.
Presumably, a person holding up a phone live-streaming would be party to the conversation.
If two people are talking at a party, and a third person obviously comes by within earshot, then the two people can either stop talking, or they can continue, but the third person is now party to the conversation.
My own anecdotal experience is that the generational gap is actually the inverse of what was described above. Younger people seem to be very much moree acutely aware of the dangers of publicity and much more guarded about what they do in public if it could potentially end up online.
"The age of posting on Facebook under your real name with privacy settings public is long gone"
According to my 18 year old niece, FB is just for old people anyway. (Thank god I never really used it). They still use Instagram, though.
Privacy concerns .. are little in general. Hard to be popular, when you avoid the mainstream plattforms. And yes, private groups are on the rise everywhere.
Yeah, kinda happened like a decade-plus ago, when facebook opened up to everyone. I know I stopped using it when my parents (baby boomers) got on there.
> just being seen in a small segment of a YouTube video with no name is a pretty minor risk
It might become a slightly larger risk when image processing and face recognition get cheap enough that anyone can search to find every video/livestream/photo containing your face.
Yeah, it just happened to a woman I know recently. She took part in some naked protests like 20 years ago and photographs of them went up on various sites like Flickr from a host of different photographers and no one ever thought about it. Recently she was targeted in a revenge porn incident by someone who had used facial recognition search engines to gather dozens of nude photographs of her before distributing them by name on porn sites.
You don’t need to find nude photos of anyone anymore if you want to do revenge porn. If you have any picture of someone there are “nudity sites” for years and years ago wasn’t there an open source one that was on GitHub? (please no one reply with the name - seriously - no need to give it any publicity on HN).
Actual nudes are even worse than AI nudes. With AI nudes
- the victim knows they are fake, which provides some emotional distance (similar to when actors choose to use prostetics or doubles for a nude scene: the viewer doesn't know but the actor still feels more comfortable)
- most of them are bad enough that the discerning eye can spot it as an AI image (many chronically online people are scarily good at that)
- they can be proven to be fake because they are just an imagined version of your body ('look, I have a tatoo/mole/scar/blemish here that isn't in the nude, it's obviously fake')
AI nudes are still pretty bad, but services that turn up nude images of you by indexing the internet with face-detection are way worse
But most people don’t have a discerning eye. I’ve never used a nudify site. But uploading a picture of me and my wife to Grok and letting it make a 6 second video is already pretty good. On one, the only thing I noticed was that the reflection in a window wasn’t following the movement.
Also, if you down sample the quality of the video, it would be even harder to tell it was a fake.
That’s neither here nor there. Would you want even a fake nude of you online?
That's neither here nor there, the claim was that deepfakes were a replacement for actual nudes, but you're maybe overlooking that the actual invasiveness is an important part of what the abuser finds appealing about the real thing.
Both are of course terrible, they're both abusive and both are becoming illegal in more and more places, but one is more invasive than the other.
I'm not sure your comment is completely necessary. I'm well aware there are such apps--I volunteered for years with a women's charity so I've seen it all--but they are two completely different attack vectors. I "wish" that one could stand in for the other but the reality is abusers just have two new ways to harass women in top of ash the other age old techniques.
I'm also aware there are probably a number of guys on this site who work in that space so just as a message to you if you're reading: You suck.
The private spaces are still at risk. Just one kid needs to claim he was offended and bring a screenshot to a teacher and it's game over for the kids' privacy.
The entire reason tiktok got so popular is the younger generation (born in the mid 90s to early 2000s) normalizing sharing so much of their lives publicly.
It's given rise to a much richer form of social media and "personal brand" building when done well, IMO. Although I have noticed the tide starting to turn, with the amount of us-vs-them sentiment all over the internet lately.
Honestly, if I was a kid just discovering social media today, I'd be extremely guarded too.
Both my kids (and me) found it very off-putting, so there's some anecdata that at least some young kids still feel it's an invasion of privacy.
Maybe not all is lost.