The Snoop Next Door Is Posting to YouTube

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Your most trivial missteps are increasingly ripe for exposure online, reports the Wall Street Journal, thanks to cheap cameras and entrepreneurs hoping to profit from websites devoted to the exposure. From the article: 'The most trivial missteps by ordinary folks are increasingly ripe for exposure as well. There is a proliferation of new sites dedicated to condemning offenses ranging from bad parking and leering to littering and general bad behavior. One site documents locations where people have failed to pick up after their dogs. Capturing newspaper-stealing neighbors on video is also an emerging genre. Helping drive the exposés are a crop of entrepreneurs who hope to sell advertising and subscriptions.' But other factors are at work, including a return to shame as a check on social behavior, says an MIT professor."

Comments

If a cop can be there

[Snarfangel]

...a camera can be there. As long as it's a public area and a police officer can be there without warrant, or a private area where the owner consents, I don't see the problem. Only when it's somewhere where the occupant has a reasonable expectation of privacy should there be any question as to whether it should be tolerated.

This really works!

[stoneycoder]

I was in an unfortunate scenario a while back, I had to move back in with my parents for a month or two. And my teenage little sister is quite disgusting, doesn't flush the toilet, leaves trash all over the house, etc, and expects everyone else to clean it for her, it was getting to me. My attempts using normal avenues of compromise to remedy the situation were thawrted.

So I installed a keystroke logger on her laptop while she was at school, and waited til it captured her myspace password. I then proceeded to post bulletins in her name on her own profile with attached pictures of the disgusting messes. Oh man she was pissed, but guess what, a lot of the annoying stuff stopped, probably for fear of the repercussions. I know, its kind of an evil thing to do, but myspace is the only thing your average highschoolers care about these days.

As always, SF saw this coming

[rah1420]

Who remembers I See You by Damon Knight? I still remember that little story from a Daw anthology. Creeped me out.