A couple of things have happened recently to bring me to post this.
Recently I attended a concert that my daughter was in. It was an area All-State music concert and so was not governed by the rules of any one district. In the program it read, " New York State Law expressly prohibits the photographing or videotaping of minors without the prior written consent of their parents/guardians. Therefore, no photography of any kind is permitted"
I read an article in September’s Discover magazine by Douglas Rushkoff. It discussed this dichotomy of on the one hand being overly protective regarding personal image privacy and on the other hand, leaping to share images of self, friends and family online. Now there is a piece of software using face recognition algorithms that is the backbone of Riya.com that can permit a user to scan and search for matched images on the entire Internet. On Friendster and My Space, people routinely post facial shots and group shots and family shots- all can be “recognized” by this software and matched to other images. So, the shot of your face on your supposed My Space account is immediately matched to a group photo of you on your Freshman Field Hockey Team and voila- someone knows your full name and the High School you go to. To me, this kind of software is ripe for abuse and I see no non-abuse use for it. THIS is something that needs legislating.
Here’s is the problem with this conflict. Photography is ( nominally ) 180 years old. Since photography became popular with the masses and relatively inexpensive to shoot and own your own photos ( arguably in the 1940’s ), nobody has said boo about capturing a group image while really just looking to get a shot of one child- your child.
It seems to be to be yet another knee-jerk overreaction. Are there people out there who want to take photos of underage kids for nepharious uses? Undoubtedly. Is that percentage of people SO small next to the hundreds or thousands of parents/family members attending the average youth performance of any kind? I would say it must be.
I am curious to know if that cited NY State law is on the books, and exactly what the wording is.
I am curious to see why there can be justification for barring the photographing of groups of kids in a public performance ( anyone was allowed to buy a ticket and enter the Host School ), but there are no laws controlling this kind of recognition software.
I remember being handed some bullshit line about photography/filming not being permitted at my daughter’s ballet recital; they said it some sort of copyright protection because of the recorded music being used.
Then a week later the ballet school was selling home-made videos of that performance for $30 a piece; filmed by the director’s husband who didn’t seem to know jackshit about how to film a performance (his previous efforts consisted of zooming in and out at random moments.
I seriously doubt it has anything to do with filming an event with minors being illegal. I hate to think we’ve come to that.
Oh, I assumed there would be the same set-up at this concert and that was why they came up with that ruse. However, there were no cameras in the house anywhere. One or two hardy souls with still digital cameras shot some stuff from the side aisles, but nothing else.
Or, it could simply be that cameras, as you noted, have been around for nearly two centuries, and we’ve had plenty of time to see how photography can be used and abused, and bring those abuses to the attention of our legislators. The face matching software is extremely new, there are (so far) no instances of it being used in a criminal or nefarious manner, and most people (to say nothing of most legislators) have no idea that it exists yet.
Congress is not psychic. They cannot make laws against things that do not yet exist. They have to wait for them to be invented, and then for somene to demonstrate that the new invention poses a threat to the public good.
That said, I still don’t think this software should be banned. I doubt it’s nearly as effective as it is being presented as, but even if it is, the answer is to keep your image off of the internet. If you willingly put your picture out to the public, you have little room to complain about what use the public puts that picture to. While I don’t necessarily agree with the New York statute against photographing someone else’s kid (I need a lot more information on that one before I render any judgement) it’s an entirely different kettle of fish from this new software. The law, from what has been presented on it here, seems geared to allow people control over their image.
Agreed, it is a different kettle of fish- but I mentioned both items because they are a part of the same continuum: use of images publicly and privately, control, permission and exploitation.