Slashdot Mirror
Vint Cerf: Media Tagging Can Be Disconcerting
coondoggie writes "Cerf says he profoundly feels the advent of cameras everywhere and the ability to post video and photos online can be hugely disconcerting. He recounts how he stepped once off a helicopter for a meeting in Brazil and minutes later was informed a video of himself doing that had been posted to YouTube, something he found to be a discomforting experience. He says getting constant notes about being 'tagged' in online photos from social networking sites such as Facebook still remains a bit of a jolt."
Here you learn what to do to avoid being tagged.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
He looks too important.
Maybe people would cease to tag him if he didn't look like the Architect from Matrix.
What is scary about this technology is that anyone will be able to tag anyone else and follow them any where they go.
With Facebook, plus facial recognition, plus public video, plus tagging, I can follow/cyberstalk anyone from anywhere.
Welcome to the world where everyone is your Big Brother.
Because at this point it's a moot point. Once the public knows who you are, there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to arrange for yourself to be forgotten. It kind of reminds me of what I've heard about Greta Garbo, she did her last work in 1948 and spent the next 40 years or so being out of the spotlight. In the modern era, she'd be completely unable to maintain that as every time somebody did sight her there would be a tagged image on the net.
What personally concerns me is that it's not just celebrities that end up online like that, an increasing number of people are posted and tagged by friends and complete strangers without any control. Just look at the people of walmart site.
It is not when technology correctly tags you that is scary.
It is when technology incorrectly tags you that it is scary.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It would have been funnier if it had been Tim Berners-Lee or one of the symantic web metadata folksomonies ontology web2.0 visionaries bitching about being tagged.
THL phish sticks
I don't much care to be tagged on Facebook, etc, but from TFS:
He says getting constant notes about being 'tagged' in online photos
At least he knows he's getting tagged - the tags you don't know about are a lot worse. The ones you know about you can delete or plan for. The privacy invasion you are unaware of is worse than the one you know about.
I just finished banging my G/F and a few minutes later I get a phone call from some guy saying he just got a video of me banging his wife. Then a half an hour later some kids show up going on about a video of me banging their mom. It's all just a little too much.
Here's the "discomforting" video. Keep in mind he's not just some random attendee to that ICANN conference - he was the friggin' chairman of the board, arriving in the least subtle way possible. And now he's bothered that some fan noticed...
The trouble here is that the threshold for "celebrity" is becoming alarmingly low. The idea that you choose cede a certain amount of privacy when you choose to become highly visible -- and make no mistake, this is ALSO a very new notion in human history -- doesn't really make sense as cameras become omnipresent, and all media is instantly shared. Tagging is really just a mechanism for allowing that sharing, but the sharing plus the tidal wave of recordings is what marks a change.
You can use the "chosen celebrity" argument when you claim you have no sympathy for the privacy woes of, say, Demi Moore. But what about Rebecca Black? Jessi Slaughter? If a webcam and two minutes of 4chan's attention is all you need to become an internet celebrity or pariah, isn't that setting the bar pretty damn low?
In this case, Vint Cerf is a celebrity. To someone. Pretty much everyone can be called "a celebrity to someone" if you talk about a narrow enough circle of interests. Andy Warhol used to talk about everyone's 15 minutes. These days people like to talk about the 1000 True Fans that better networking allows. It all boils down to a lowered barrier between invisible private life and highly visible public life. Untagging yourself is never an option at this level. You're trying to do work to cancel the work of many more people (fans and friends), using many services, some of which you may not know about, all believing that they are the very least acting harmlessly. In this case, Cerf has basically just been good at his job, and outspoken in promoting History's Next Great Thing that he was lucky enough to be around for. Does that really justify publicizing every part of his public life? If so, what does that say for competent, ambitious workers of the future? Are the options really "get comfortable on camera or don't participate in society"?
Pretty much all privacy cases involving governments devolve into the arguments that to be able to spy is to spy (whether spying is actively being done right now or not). In civil cases, it comes down to whether the aggrieved had a reasonable expectation of privacy, "reasonable" being established by an average person from the greater community. In an existential way, it must be a bit terrifying to one of his generation that an entire younger generation has grown comfortable with, and actually embraces a level of self-surveillance the Stasi wouldn't even be able to dream of.
A privacy free future envisioned: The Light Of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. http://www.sfsite.com/06a/lod82.htm
What does it take to get people to see a problem with thier government?
Education.
An extremely traumatic and terrible event happened to my wife and I last year. It was front page news in several newspapers, with our full names, our jobs, and other background information about us. When my wife's unique name is googled, it comes up in the first page of results. Neither one of us is even remotely famous, interesting, or worthy of attention in any way, and this was not something that we did or caused.
This has nothing to do with celebrity other than that a celebrity is complaining. Society hasn't quite caught up to the internet yet, and there are some very fucked up things that can happen thanks to the inability for information to be lost/forgotten/hard-to-find, and for information about individuals to be unleashed into that system without those individuals wanting or intending it to be there. Maybe someday society will be able to handle it better, but in the meantime it's worth talking about and trying to deal with, rather than just dismissing it as not having sympathy (by which you really mean empathy) for someone.