A festival in the Netherlands has come up with a strange response to the EU's new GDPR privacy laws: it's asking attendees who don't want to be photographed to opt out by putting a red dot on their forehead.
Imagine, you’re partaking in Pedestrian Sunday at Kensington Market on a sunny summer afternoon in Toronto, Canada, walking around with your Fuji X100F in hand looking for that Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment.” Suddenly you see a child leaning against a dilapidated, graffiti-splashed wall the likes of which would make Banksy nod in approval.
Jeff Mermelstein’s photographic practice of making presumably private text conversations public by photographing people’s phones while they are texting and then posting the results on Instagram has made a splash recently. Of course the highlight that ran in Business Insider was framed as a question in a PetaPixel article: is Mermelstein’s practice ethically sound?
This week Business Insider ran a story that covered images taken by a street photographer of people’s private phone messages. That photographer was the highly respected Jeff Mermelstein, someone who has a long list of celebrated work.
Samsung's smartphones may not be randomly bursting into flames now, but a strange and creepy new problem has appeared: some users are having photos randomly and quietly sent to other people.
As privacy concerns grow and as facial detection/recognition technologies improve, a new arms race is emerging. Researchers have created a new privacy photo filter that prevents facial recognition systems from detecting and recognizing faces.
The EU has a new data protection law, the so-called GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, or as we Germans like to call it: “Datenschutzgrundverordnung” (Gesundheit!). The rules took effect on May 25th and so far it’s pretty chaotic: in the EU we cannot reach some newspapers in the outside world because they cannot comply with the new rules.
Instagram has publicly launched its new "Data Download" tool that lets users download a copy of all the photos and data they've uploaded to the service. The move comes at a time in which calls for "data portability" are increasing around the world.
Facebook has long allowed you to download a complete copy of your data, and now Instagram is reportedly following suit. You'll soon be able to download your entire history of photos and content from the popular photo sharing service.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying on Capitol Hill this week regarding his company's use of users' personal data. Zuckerberg denied secretly listening to users through microphones for ad targeting, but the company is able to quietly collect quite a bit of data from a single uploaded photo.
Instagram is testing out a new feature that Snapchat helped make famous: users are being notified when other people shoot screenshots of photos and videos in Instagram Stories.
Instagram is rolling out a new Activity Status feature that you may or may not be comfortable with, depending on how much privacy you like to have on social networks. It allows people you follow or have previously chatted with to see how long ago you were last on Instagram.
Security researcher Kevin Finisterre recently found a flaw that exposed private customer data of the Chinese drone company DJI to the public. After reporting the bug to DJI's bug bounty program, Finisterre received pushback and a legal threat. So instead of collecting his $30,000 bounty, Finisterre is now going public with his findings (and experience).
LiShield is a new LED light bulb technology that helps protect privacy by confusing cameras to prevent unauthorized photos. The bulb is the creation of a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego.
More and more cameras are getting Internet connectivity these days, opening the door to new security and privacy concerns. A Dutch woman learned a creepy lesson on this recently when her Internet-connected camera started tracking her and talking to her.
Two months after the US Army ended its use of DJI drones due to "cybersecurity" reasons, DJI has just launched a new privacy mode that allows operators to fly completely offline. DJI says the goal is to provide "enhanced data privacy assurances for sensitive government and enterprise customers."
Well-known TV personality Mike Rowe took to Facebook yesterday to share a crazy story of how a camera drone violated his privacy... by capturing him standing naked in his own bedroom.
A veteran French photographer is facing criminal charges in France over a photo she took during the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France.
Russian photographer and art student Egor Tsvetkov used his own photos and a facial recognition app to destroy any illusion of privacy we might have with his latest project "Your Face is Big Data."
Over 1.5 billion people worldwide use the Facebook app on a monthly basis, and all of those people have opted in to Facebook’s privacy policy by the act of creating an account.
Could your smartphone camera one day be turned on and used by the government for surveillance? That's what Apple is warning the public about as it continues to battle the FBI in court.
France's national police force is warning parents to stop sharing photos of their kids through Facebook, saying the practice could expose the children to privacy and security issues.
Germany is known to have some of the strictest privacy laws in Europe, and sometimes the policies trump photography rights and copyright. The country's highest court just ruled that a photographer must delete "intimate" photos of his ex-lover -- pictures that were consented to when they were created and which the man had no intention of sharing.
If you are the owner of a camera drone and are big on privacy, this news may be concerning to you: the mandatory drone registry that's being launched by the FAA will make your name and address available to the public.
Wary of sharing location data in photos? Get this: a burglary suspect arrested last week is accused of using geotagged photos from Instagram and Facebook to find female college students, break into their homes, and steal their underwear.
Back in July, we reported that 47-year-old William H. Merideth of Hillview, Kentucky, had gotten arrested for using a shotgun to shoot down a neighbor's drone that was flying over his property.
Merideth was just cleared of all charges after a judge ruled that the camera drone's flight was indeed an invasion of privacy.
Canon's Selphy line of compact photo printers use cartridges that contain both paper and ink, allowing you to use your digital camera or smartphone like an instant camera while you're out and about. There's one thing you might not know about the cartridges, though: empty cartridges contain faint copies of the photos that were printed.
A new patent filed by Facebook suggests that the social networking giant is working on giving user cameras a unique digital fingerprint. Looking for ways to identify fraudulent accounts and evermore establish what connections you may have with others, the new technology means that your future photographs will be tracked at levels previously unimaginable. For photographers, however, it may be an excellent way to prove that you truly own an image.
A new letter published by Kensington Palace in the United Kingdom sheds light at the extreme measures paparazzi are taking in order to capture valuable photos of Prince George, the son of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Prince George was born in 2013 and has endured the prying lenses of paparazzi photographers since day one.
The letter was addressed to “leaders of media industry bodies and standards organizations" around the world. It argues that tactics being used to photograph Prince George are becoming “increasingly dangerous” and have become distressing.
A man in Kentucky was arrested this past Sunday after he used a shotgun to shoot down a camera drone flying over his property. He's being charged with criminal mischief and wanton endangerment, both of which are felonies.
In the age of digital photography, many of us turn to online cloud solutions to help us backup our precious moments. However, the question that many of us want to know is what permissions a perspective service has with our content. With a form of hysteria sweeping the Web, we have decided to take a look at the industry’s top storage solutions and what their terms of service say about the files you upload. By using any of these solutions, you are automatically accepting their terms.
NYC-based photographer Arne Svenson, whom we interviewed last month, has won a lengthy legal battle against people who claimed that he had invaded their privacy by taking pictures of them in their homes through open windows.
If you'd like a long and fruitful career as a street photographer, Saudi Arabia might not be the most welcoming place for you to pursue it. Shooting public photos and sharing them online is becoming more and more popular in the Middle Eastern kingdom, but many practitioners are unaware that the country's strict cybercrime law could bring down huge fines and even jail time for their snapshots.
If you're not comfortable with the idea of uploading photos to the Web with geotag data baked into the file, there are some easy ways you can scrub the data to protect your privacy. Both Mac and Windows computers offer simple solutions for quickly removing sensitive location info from your photo files.
As photo sharing becomes one of the fastest growing niches in social media, a new British advertising campaign is warning kids and their parents about the dangers of sharing too much through online photo services.
As the quality of cameras becomes better and better, there's a new security issue emerging that you may have not thought about: fingerprints being stolen from photos.
Hackers are reporting that a person's fingerprints can be reproduced using public photos that show their hand.
We've published a number of posts in the past on how you can recover photos that were accidentally deleted from your computer or memory card. But what about when you delete a photo and expect it to actually be gone forever?
The ease with which deleted files can often be recovered means that you should be careful when selling or tossing hard drives or memory cards -- your photos and files might end up falling into the wrong hands if someone decides to try data recovery.
A Canadian judge has ordered Google to pay a Montreal woman for the violation of her privacy after she found an embarrassing photograph of herself on Google Street View. Google's automated cameras had captured the woman sitting on her doorstep, leaning forward with a portion of her cleavage exposed.
In a bill meant to bring California's privacy laws into a drone-heavy 21st century, the state just signed an act into law that will make it both illegal and very expensive for anybody seeking to invade someone else's privacy by taking photos of them with a camera drone.
In the ongoing app battle to keep private photos safe and sound from unintended recipients (and the general public), a new app called Yovo – You Only View Once – brings an interesting technology to the table.
It's called D-fence, and is based around the idea that your eyes can see what's behind a slatted fence as you're driving by at a high speed.