Comment by ElProlactin
8 hours ago
This hypocrisy is not at all surprising. The modus operandi for these people has been rules for thee, but not for me for quite a while now.
8 hours ago
This hypocrisy is not at all surprising. The modus operandi for these people has been rules for thee, but not for me for quite a while now.
Well, it is and it isn't hypocrisy.
It is hypocrisy because Meta are knowingly creating a product that is perfectly suited for filming or photographing people without their knowledge. I find that it speaks ill of someone's character to pretend otherwise. And then they react badly when the very thing that these products enable happens to them. Demonstrating how this is a problem. They try to pretend it isn't a problem and then their actions demonstrate that it IS a problem.
It isn't because we do have laws that actually cover these things already. Of course, they're not the same across the world, law enforcement are not always aware of what the laws are, and this causes confrontations and sometimes overreach. There are also different legal systems that interpret laws differently. For instance in some legal systems the letter of the law carries more weight. In other legal systems the intent of the law is what matters.
There are two great risks here:
1) we pretend we can get by with existing laws. That the existing laws had enough foresight to meaningfully fulfil what the laws were intended to accomplish.
2) we can overreact and damage legitimate freedoms in our eagerness to solve an immediate problem.
For instance, where I live there is a law on the books that prohibits photographing someone being arrested. The law was well-meaning. It was there to protect people from being plastered all over the media until guilt has been determined in a court of law. But it would also prohibit someone from documenting police brutality during an arrest. So the law was never enacted because it failed to balance interests properly.
Right now, where I live, there is a real risk that rules about photography may become overly strict because politicians feel they have to demonstrate an ability to act. So they may end up passing laws that have unforeseen consequences while probably failing to make much of a difference anyway.
We know why these cameras pose a problem. Let's not insult each other's intelligence by pretending they are exactly like poking a traditional camera in someone's face. They're not and we should be able to agree on simple facts. But we also know that we need to have a public discussion about what we're going to do about this so we don't end up introducing draconian laws that take away freedoms we should have. For instance the freedom to document abuses of power, criminal activity, artistic expression etc.
It's not "perfectly suited", it's EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO do that. And it's very well designed and very effective.
But hey it's OK because Meta only want to record everything to train their AI, who cares if some of their friends use it to create CSAM material, their third-world country workers upload it to PornHub and the NSA secretly pipe all of that through their servers (or servers managed by MI5 in the case of Americans).
They added a recording light and made covering it stop recording or photography. They went through extra effort to at least try and provide a public signal someone is recording.
Citation needed buddy…
We should be thankful for the small mercy they their manta at least rhymes.
> rules for thee, but not for me
This is their theory of power, that the selected few get access to a state of exception (but you can lose it at any time, so don't slip up).
Trump and oligarchs broadly have offered this franchise to their most loyal.
But! I'd argue it is not precisely hypocrisy, because they never believed in a rules-based order in the first place. They just see a system they can exploit.
break things has always been right there in black and white.
Feel free to point out the hypochrisy. I'll remind you that sharing a video you took of someone without their consent is not the same as recording them and keeping the video strictly for yourself
This person was not trespassing on Meta property and nothing indicates that he was harassing employees who refused to be interviewed. It is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
You don't need someone's consent to record in public, and if any of the employees objected to the publication of the recording, they could consult with an attorney about a portrait rights claim. Such a claim should be adjudicated by a court, not Facebook.
And let's be clear about the context here: these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online, and they're also used to record all sorts of junk/nonsense ("pranks", pickup artist BS, etc.).
Meta doesn't seem to have a problem with content recorded with these glasses being posted on its platforms, even when it's objectionable, because it's literally everywhere. The only problem here, obviously, was that he was recording Meta employees.
"these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online"
This to me is wild. I use the glasses to film my kids and share it on private hard-drives with grandparents, that's it. It's wild to me that I can surreptitiously film someone on the street and publish it online for views, and the only recourse the person has, is to go to court? Seems insane.
Why does Hollywood require a release but Youtube does not?
EDIT: People are getting hung-up on my use case. But that's not the question posed here.
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FALSE! It's legal to record in public spaces and share it if you are not targeting any individual in particular. What the author did was instead purpusefully focus on those particular employees.
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But we are talking about Meta removing content from their own website, right?
In contrast to what people think, Facebook IS NOT public infrastructure.
If Meta removes some content from Meta website, and you don't like that, it's a you problem, right?
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> portrait rights claim
Note that the employees were not recognisable; their faces were blurred out.
> is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
it's perfectly legal to record but publish, especially in but not limited to a commercial context without explicit consent violates portrait rights under the GDPR in the EU. And I strongly suspect if you posted a video in which people explicitly object to being filmed and flag that on Facebook or other platforms it will get taken down.
It's illegal to record people in public spaces in Germany. Not sure how NL is important here, did I miss something?
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Users of these devices already share that data with Meta.
Where do you get the "without their consent" bit from?
The hypocrisy is probably located around here:
> "I've been making satirical videos about all kinds of things for ten years: Gaza, Ukraine, refugees. Funny videos that push boundaries and provoke discussion. But I've never experienced a video being removed before.
The hypocrisy is that meta is creating a tool that their employees are very uncomfortable seeing used on them.
What the law says about consent is irrelevant to the hypocrisy, and the videos are automatically uploaded to meta without anyone's consent anyway. You know this very well, there is no need to cosplay the smart devil's advocate.
Since you can apparently read my mind, there is no need for me to reply
They made a device that will create this problem by the millions for other people, they should have it inflicted on them every day.
It's incredibly hypocritical. It's like working at Flock and complaining about being filmed on a Flock camera. Or working for a company that sells cars that emit a loud, annoying sound and complaining about those cars in your neighborhood. Or making devices for children but banning your own children from using them because the devices are harmful. They clearly don't care that the product their company is selling can legally (in most places) be used to film people in public until they themselves are filmed in public. How is that not hypocrisy?
Any camera in the world can be used to film people in public without their consent. There are lawful ways to do it (if the people are "background noise" and not the point of the video), and unlawful ways to do it (if the people become the subject of the video).
So tell me now, is a GoPro/Canon/Apple employee who doesn't consent to being the subject of a video taken with a GoPro/Canon/iPhone camera also a hypochrite?
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It is not as you feel any different when you are being recorded. Once recorded, you don't know what they will do with the video.
I agree, I cannot control what other people will do. Are you applying this fear to all other facets of your life? I guess not, since that would mean you'd live in a state of constant fear and paranoia.
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neither of these things are remotely acceptable. the degree of distinction is relevant to the impact on the victim and in a punitive sense, but doing either of these things is a mark of a severely antisocial behavior disorder that needs to be addressed by mental healthcare and prevention of access to tools that facilitate this behavior.
Feel free to cite scientific studies proving your unhinged claim
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The mental gymnastics that people do here to defend these untouchable corporations is disgusting. From Meta to OpenAi, for a lot of people here it's just a "yeah, but actually". I've reported everything from holocaust glorification to videos of people being filmed in public in europe just to be humiliated, to obvious far right propaganda done by russian linked accounts, nothing goes against Meta's policy anymore, except when it's about them...
The asymmetry bothers me. No one corporation is going to get it right 100% of the time but it's when you report stuff and it never gets removed but they ban you that you can really see how morally bankrupt they are
(Oh, and they don't care about local solutions. Their sneakiness with Free Basics is clear. Can you blame them for Myanmar? I think you can, but it's also clear they want to supplant all the other social networks, like a system each individual country might come up with)
It does bother me being here on hacker news because it's a good aggregator but you get people standing up for their industry no matter what or flagging anything they disagree with
Spoken as a man with no children or partner. Any women or child being recorded by a stranger will feel unsafe.
Do you have a point beside saying something completely unrelated while making up stuff about me?
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