My point was not related to the actual capturing of the pictures or their posting on the web...I have lots of questions about the ethics of both those acts. My point is that once they were posted on a publicly accessible website, the late night talk show hosts didn't substantially increase the potential audience for the posted pictures. As for your final comment...clearly we disagree on that one in relation to research at least...and as I am not a lawyer I will make no comments outside that limitation. Lois Ann Scheidt Doctoral Student - School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington IN USA Adjunct Instructor - School of Informatics, IUPUI, Indianapolis IN USA and IUPUC, Columbus IN USA Webpage: http://www.loisscheidt.com Blog: http://www.professional-lurker.com Quoting Michael Zimmer <michael.zimmer@nyu.edu>:
How are they not adding to the potential audience? When I'm sitting in the park, there are a finite number of people in the park who happen to be looking in my direction at the precise moment my finger enters my nose. Isn't that often part of the calculus when people do embarrassing things in public - that few people will see it, and those that do don't know me, etc.
Now, having said action captured by a camera -- a camera, mind you, that no one gave consent to (many public CCTV systems are required to at least post notice - not so with Google's cute little cars roaming our cities with their 11-lens cameras) -- and then indexed and uploaded by one of the world's largest brokers of information constitutes a significant shift in my expectations of the visibility of my action. I had never considered (nor had any say in the matter) as to whether it would be recorded, meta-tagged with a location (perhaps even the date), nor made available online.
Even if we feel that isn't a violation of contextual integrity (see Nissenbaum), I could perhaps rest assured that it is highly unlikely that someone happens to stumble upon that particular image from the millions captured by Google. Surely, few will find it, let alone my mother. Enter Mr Leno & Mr Letterman (don't know if it was them - but for sake of example...). Now, instead of me relying on the obscurity of the particular image to protect my embarrassment, its existence and URL has been broadcast to millions by two popular and trusted celebrities. Ping!
IMO, the whole "you did it in public anyway" argument holds little water...
-mz
----- Michael Zimmer, PhD Microsoft Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School e: michael.zimmer@nyu.edu w: http://michaelzimmer.org
On Aug 13, 2007, at 6:43 PM, Lois Ann Scheidt wrote:
Not to mention the potential embarrassment to the gentleman from Arizona - I think it was Arizona - who was captured sitting on a park bench picking his nose. The potential embarrassment would be increased - at least in some writers estimation - because all the late night talk show hosts pointed directly at this guy in their monologues...even giving the URL in some cases.
HOWEVER, since the action in question - said nose picking - took place in public and was captured and posted on the web...the late night talk show hosts might have been shining a brighter light on the whole thing but they were not adding to the potential audience.
Lois
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