Photographer Arne Svenson lives on the second floor of an apartment building in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. For his project “The Neighbors,” he pointed his camera at a luxury apartment building across the street and secretly photographed its inhabitants through open windows.
Those photographs are now being sold for thousands of dollars at a gallery in NYC, but it turns out the subjects aren’t very happy with having their images stealthily snapped and sold. Read more…
If you’re the proud owner of a Wi-Fi-connected digital camera, there’s something you need to be aware of: your camera could be used to spy on you.
At the hacker conference Shmoocon 2013 last month, German security researchers Daniel Mende and Pascal Turbing reported on findings that Internet-connected cameras can easily be exploited and turned into spy cams. Read more…
Award-winning photographer Michael Wolf is raising some eyebrows with a new photo project titled “Window Watching.” The series features photographs of high-rise apartment windows in Hong Kong, offering glimpses into the lives of people living inside the private residences. Basically, Wolf pointed a telephoto lens at open windows to photograph people going about their day-to-day-lives, without their knowledge and consent. Read more…
The discussion revolved around the photograph above, which AFP photographer Emmanuel Dunand captured in the evening after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Read more…
Today is Data Privacy Day, and all of the major social websites have come out to play. Facebook is launching an “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer” form, Google explained its approach to government requests for information in a blog post, and Twitter launched an entire website dedicated to transparency in all things data privacy related.
That last one is particularly interesting to us, because that website includes detailed copyright notice stats, putting copyright infringement on Twitter into raw numbers. Oh, and did we mention, copyright notices are by far the most common requests submitted to Twitter — over three-and-a-half times more frequent than government info requests. Read more…
Several mugshot websites — including Just Mugshots, Busted! Mugshots, Mugshots Online, and MugRemove — are ringing in the new year with a massive class action law suit. According to NPR, hundreds of people who have been exonerated of all charges and had their records sealed are suing the websites for not only keeping their mugshots up and using them in banner ads, but refusing to take them down and “scrub” them off the Internet unless the victims pay a hefty fee. Read more…
Engadget and gdgt founder Ryan Block has published an op-ed over at The New York Times on why he has decided to quit Instagram. It comes in the aftermath of Instagram’s policy hoopla, but it’s not the same argument you’ve been seeing all over the web:
As technology companies work overtime to make it easier to sign up and maintain accounts, little regard is given to the long-term ownership and use of our data. After all, it’s far easier for each of us to simply forget and neglect all the random sites and services we’ve signed up for than to keep up with the innumerable changes to opaque terms of service and privacy policy documents, or monitor every merger and acquisition of every company that makes something we use. In fact, to do so would basically be a full-time job, and an excruciatingly tedious one at that.
Block gives an example of how his account on Friendster (once a dominant social network) was eventually sold to a random company geared toward Southeast Asian youth, resulting in a flood of marketing messages. Obviously his argument applies to not only Instagram, but most photo-sharing services on the web today.
The saga of anti-virus pioneer John McAfee’s run from the law is a strange one, but this much is clear: McAfee wishes geotagging wasn’t a feature built into modern cameras. After a month of fleeing from Belizean law enforcement after a neighbor was found murdered, the software tycoon was finally taken into custody this week, largely due to a single photo loaded with GPS data. Read more…
Have you heard of the term sousveillance? It’s the inverse of surveillance: instead of a camera pointed at individuals, individuals wear their own cameras on themselves to document their activities. Wearable-camera pioneer Steve Mann has written a fascinating piece for Time, titled “Eye Am a Camera: Surveillance and Sousveillance in the Glassage“, in which he offers his vision of what the future will look like once wearable cameras such as Google Glass (seen above) become ubiquitous. Read more…
Well, this can’t be good for photographers’ rights: An anonymous man over in Seattle, Washington is causing a stir in his area and on the web by walking up to random people in various locations — both public and private — and sticking a camera in their faces to film them. When asked to explain his actions, he simply responds in vague statements such as “It’s OK, I’m just recording video.” Read more…
