Slashdot Mirror
When Art, Apple and the Secret Service Collide
theodp writes "Last July, Slashdot reported on Kyle McDonald, the artist who had the Secret Service raid his home at the behest of Apple, who was miffed with Kyle's surreptitious capture of people's expressions as they stared at computers in Apple Stores. A year later, Wired is running McDonald's first-person account of the preparation for and fallout from his People Staring at Computers project. 'I really wasn't expecting the Secret Service,' McDonald begins. 'Maybe an email, or a phone call from Apple. Instead, my first indication that something was "wrong" was a real-life visit from the organization best known for protecting the President of the United States of America.'"
Face it, it's game over for the man on the street. Big brother decides who will do what even if it's not against one of his laws. Anyone at anytime can be pounded on for anything.
Granted, it's still worth fighting the powers that be but not enough people are going to do it until there is little hope left. Today it would be relatively easy for the people to rise up in comparison of where we will be 10 years from now.
Oh, and if you think that choosing Mitt or Barak is going to change this or even slow it? Get your head out of your ass.
He can call it art, most human beings would call it creepy as hell, and last I checked you aren't supposed to be installing hidden spy equipment on Apple's display units. And what if Apple had sold any of these display units? Then you'd have hidden spy equipment inside people's homes, snapping photos and emailing this guy. Also I doubt he programmed in the stores hours, so you could have them snapping photos of employees before and after business was open when they do have an expectation of privacy.
So yeah, if you are doing mass installs of spy software, you can expect a knock on your door.
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
Do you really need a law to know that this is wrong?
Just because something might be legal, doesn't mean it is right.
Change out "small Mom & Pop store" for "Apple store" and see how you feel about this guy's art project.
I don't require a law to say please and thank you, or to know that a business is a business, not a playground for your art project.
Of course you can use YOUR own personal camera to record people in public. But you have no right to take over and use Apple's display computer cameras and use it to record people and upload to the web. This wasn't art, it was rude. We decry the loss of privacy in this country and yet when it's done for "art" some people are shocked that anybody could be upset.
but you are kind of a dick if you transgress against people by taking unauthorized pictures of them with equipment that isn't yours and then using the pictures without their permission
so i'm not very sympathetic to the stalkerific "artist"
but i'm sure we'll see a lot of comments here about the violations of the federal government in this situation, completely ignoring the violations committed by this douchebag
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1) The Apple Store is not a "public facility" it is private property.
2) he wasn't using his own equipment, he was installing software on Apple's machines.
3) Apple doesn't "forbid" you from using your own cameras and recording equipment in their stores to "record what they witness in plain sight", it just frowns on you effectively installing hidden cameras to capture people's images without them knowing.
Yes, highly "tyrannical" of a private business deciding that installing hidden camera and spyware software on computers owned by them in a place of business owned/rented by them without asking permission (of either Apple or the unsuspecting customers) and trying to handwave it away with a "it's not mentioned that this sort of behaviour is explicitly forbidden therefore it's ok" was something it was not happy about.
Mmm. I'm sure Apple is quaking in its boots that an Apple hater is thinks their decision to put a stop to a guy secretly recording its customers using its own display computers with spyware is a bad one.
AmerCIA.
"We're keeping an eye on you, buddy."
Now, you have to consult with the EFF, before you want to take pictures of people shopping in a mall.
Way to fucking go, land of Jefferson.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
yeah and none of those laws give you the right to install your own equipment or your own spyware inside the facilities infrastructure. you can take pictures with your own equipment on your own person. you cant install random cameras throughout any facility you want to or bug their computers. are you retarded or just stupid ?
You would be completely wrong. You have an expectation that there are video cameras all throughout the store for security reasons. They will at least capture video, they might even capture audio. You have no expectation of privacy in a place open to the public.
Yeah, the most interesting paragraph was this one:
That really sounds like some religious cult.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Isn't this blatant wasting of tax payers money? Clearly secret service was involved because of a) pressured by Apple lobbyists, or b) their buds in Government made it to act for "the good" of their corporate overlords.
As the TFA points out, the Secret Service performed an investigation. That is, somebody thought something was weird, it got bounced up the chain to a couple of field agents who acted professionally, even displayed a teensy tiny bit of humor ("We're from the FBI, maam, we don't have a sense of humor that we are aware of.") and compassion, spent some time and in the end, decided it wasn't a big deal. Remember, these guys didn't know what goofball artiste was up to. They just got a report of somebody installing what literally amounts to spyware on private computers.
If somebody did that where I work, you can bet there would be a bunch of people both in uniform and plainclothes wandering about asking pointed questions.
If anything, this reaffirms my (very limited) faith in the system. Nobody called in the SWAT team. Nobody went to jail. Yes, people were inconvenienced, but that happens every day around rush hour. Money was spent. In retrospect they didn't really need to do that, but that is what is great about hindsight.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Naw, Apple isn't quaking in their boots.
They should be nervous, though, that people are more and more noticing the subtle stench that they emit.
All we have is his insistance he asked for and received permission. Unless you assume that no one would ever lie to protect themselves from legal consequences, his word is untrustworthy.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
You can take pictures if you want, but to publish them in any way, be it a magazine, website or artistic display, you need to get permission from the individuals in the pictures to do so. It's called a model release and every ethical photographer knows about them.
It's idiots like this that are screwing around that are causing the erosion of photographer's rights all over the planet.
We've self-regulated for a long time, but now that arseholes like this are not even looking to see how they should behave, the authorities are starting to get involved.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
As all Apple customers he has battered wife syndrome...
Here's the point: We've all already begun to acknowledge the death of privacy. Most of us know that yes, we stand a chance of being recorded at any time, at any place. That's oooold news, Admiral Burrito. With this knowledge in hand, the point of contention is now, "How well is access to that information controlled?"
Consider Mr. J. Random Dork, in an Apple store, aggregating thousands of photos of strangers without consent, for his own purposes. He is showing people, by his own conduct, that he is not a very good steward of the information he is collecting. He didn't ask the subjects, he didn't ask the venue, he didn't ask legal counsel, he didn't even ask his peers. In fact he deliberately avoided all those responsible inquiries because he knew his project was objectionable to all of them from the outset. Directing anger at him is not "shooting the messenger". Once you're writing your own code, you've pretty much moved beyond the "messenger" role and into the "perpetrator" role.