Photo Tagging as a Privacy Problem?

An anonymous reader writes "The Harvard Law Review, a journal for legal scholarship, recently published a short piece on the privacy implications of online photo-tagging (pdf). The anonymously penned piece dourly concludes that 'privacy law, in its current form, is of no help to those unwillingly tagged.' Focusing on the privacy threat from newly emergent automatic facial recognition search engines', like Polar Rose but not Flickr or Facebook, the article states that 'for several reasons, existing privacy law is simply ill-suited for this new invasion.' The article suggests that Congress create a photo-tagging opt-out system, similar to what they did with telemarketing calls and the Do-Not-Call Registry." How would you enforce such a registry, though?

Comments

Re:Not so simple

[Znork]

You know, all of a sudden I gain a whole new understanding of why some women willingly wear a burka.

I can see a whole new fashion genre being driven by our emerging everpresent surveillance and recording. When will ThinkGeek get a 'privacy enhanced clothing' section?

"They may not like what they see."

[LionKimbro]

"Although Catherine Bosley received attention because of her public career, the lesson of the story is applicable to anyone: when employers or others have easy access to our most personal information, they may not like what they see."

-- TFA

I'm trying to figure out, "What is it about this quotation that's bothering me?"

There's something that bugs me about this whole thing; Like we're ashamed of who we are, or like we're trying to keep ourselves safe from all the judgmental people out there, or like we don't have the courage to tell people, "Hey, this is how I have a good time, and you just have to deal with it."

I can't quite put my finger on it...

I think it has something to do with my ideas about how social progress is made. I think that, when, as a people, we're hiding and squirreling away the realities in our lives, from "the public," I think we're doing a disservice to the world. When people catch our private lives, and we have to say, "Well, you know what? Screw you all- THIS IS OKAY, and here's why" -- we find ourselves unwitting social activists.

We may have spent all our lives hating social activists, and bitterly spitting, saying, "Just keep it private," but now, something is exposed, and we have to start talking to people.

I think that's something of how progress is made, in society. I think a genuinely tolerant and compassionate society is not made of a bunch of people putting blinders over their eyes.

Re:Simply put..

[SerpentMage]

Well don't act like a drunken pirate! And if a company is not willing to overlook a simple once in a while drunken pirate situation then you obviously don't want to work for the company. Or if you are more often than not the drunken pirate, well then you have a problem.

I think the bigger problem is that people have to come face to face with hypocrisy. I remember when I was a kid in highschool (late 80's) there were teenagers that would be so nice and honorable to certain people. And then be the biggest bully to other people. People regularly were hypocritical and because there is no tape rolling or picture being snapped people could always talk themselves out of the tough situations. Now those excuses don't cut it anymore because, well there is proof to the contrary. And now the teenager that was so nice in one situation and bully in another has been outed.

I personally could never play the one face to one crowd and another face to another crowd game and I am glad it is over. AND I am glad it is over for others. Let's see, police beatings where people said it never happen, politicians insulting people taping them when they said oh it was not so bad, the list goes on!

Unnecessary and Unconstitutional

[logicnazi]

Not only is this suggestion a really bad idea it seems pretty obviously unconstitutional. Rather than giving any serious consideration to the question of whether likenesses of ourselves taken in public deserve protection the paper reads more like something a student would write trying to create an impressive paper. After all everyone realizes that our loss of privacy is a bad thing so lets propose changing the law to fix it, right?

Sure, our loss of anonymity can have some harmful consequences as the anecdotes in the paper illustrate but this doesn't mean they can't convey important information. I mean on first glance the story about the republican congressman whose daughter was seen kissing another girl on facebook might appear to illustrate a harm of our loss of privacy, and it certainly was a harm to the congressmen, but I would argue it was actually a benefit to society. If that congressman didn't get elected because people found out what he was really like (more tolerant than they suspected) then it was a win for the country.

Ultimately all this technology does is let us effectively say who did what when. Surely it wouldn't be right or constitutional to ban the news media from telling us about the picture of the congressman's daughter. Nor is it acceptable to outlaw any particular act of saying who is in what picture, that is quite squarely inside the domain of free speech. Yet if free speech protects my right to tag each individual photo then it would be a very troubling precedent to set to say it doesn't protect my right to organize those tags in an accessible way. I mean just think of the problems you would get into just trying to catalog the CSPAN archive to indicate which congressmen were doing what when.

More generally while the short term effect of a loss of anonymity in public might be immediate harms in the long term we will eventually discover that everyone does stupid shit and crosses sexual and religious lines. Hopefully the ultimate effect of this loss of anonymity will be to eliminate the double standard which allows everyone to say swears, have naughty/kinky sex, and make blasphemous/non-PC remarks but gives any public official caught doing it hell.

Of course it is scary to lose a protection that has kept us safe for so long but the truth of the matter is that anonymity in public is eroding no matter what we do about it. We can either choose to embrace the good consequences along with the bad by allowing search engines and tagging sites that set up a level playing field for everyone or we can choose a system where those with enough money and lawyers get to keep their anonymity while the rest of society does not. However, that's the worst of all options because it isn't really the loss of anonymity that's harmful but the unequal loss of anonymity. If someone at your office finds pictures of just you getting drunk and doing stupid thats awful, if they can find pictures of a large fraction of the employees it's just amusing.

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Note: purposeful anonymous commentary, e.g., anonymous blogs, are a totally different subject and should be preserved.