Arkansas bans photography

[dragon]

Well not really but places some sever controls on street photography

Over the past week, Arkansas Senate has been working diligently to pass SB-79 - known as the Personal Rights Protection Act. While the bill is designed to protect the privacy and rights of the citizens within the state, it also effectively makes Street Photography illegal from viewing or taking in the state of Arkansas.

The bill's full name does a lot as to explaining the bill. Entitled “To Enact the Personal Rights Protection Act: and to Protect the Property Rights of an Individual to the Use of the Individual’s Name, Voice, Signature, and Likeness”, this bill is designed to take an individual's Rights of Publicity to an extreme, by allowing it illegal for them to be photographed or filmed on public grounds without a written consent.



As the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) explains --

The implications of this bill are staggering. For example, an image showing recognizable people posted to the Internet for a use that would not require written consent anywhere else in the world could leave you open to a lawsuit just because someone in Arkansas could view it online.

SB-79 places an unprecedented burden on all photographers whose work could be viewed within the state of Arkansas to either get explicit consent from every individual whose likeness appears in all of their photographs or risk defending themselves in a lawsuit where they will have to shoulder the burden of proving the use of their photographs qualifies as an exempted use

The ASMP and others have banded together to get this bill dropped from Arkansas law. The bill must be vetoed by Tuesday to ensure it does not go into law. The ASMP has asked all photographers (not just photographers in Arkansas) to stand up and write Governor Asa Hutchinson and Arkansas Chief of Staff Michael Lamoureux encouraging them to drop the bill from Arkansas law.

link

actual bill

[Sir Sirius]

You know, I really believed that this was a clever April fools joke... but after a bit a Googling this does appear to be legit and accurate. Something that I am still having a hard time actually believing.

In fact, what if this is an April fools pulled by the Arkansas State Legislature? Doesn't seem to have been reported on by major news outlets yet.

[Simon_Jester]

It's fairly common for state legislatures to pass laws that are just plain bad and effectively outlaw things with a far more sweeping scope than a sensible person would intend.

WARNING: BIASED STATEMENT FOLLOWS

This seems especially true in highly conservative states where the legislature is dominated by hyperconservative good ol' boys and where the reflex response to anything vaguely troubling to said good ol' boys is "Ban the shit out of it!"

[General Zod]

Even if this somehow manages to get passed it's basically asking to get quashed on first amendment grounds by the Supreme Court.

[slebetman]

France has similar laws. Except that it's for an entire country, not just a state.

[Welf]

Can someone explain why this is so bad? After all I think I should have control about something as personal as my picture. In the age of facial recognition every photo makes us more transparent and controllable.

[Borgholio]

It's bad because say if you were a tourist who went to Times Square in New York City (I know this is in Arkansas but the example is still valid). If you took a pic of Times Square then you would, at any given moment, have several hundred people in the photo. You would be expected to get written consent from every single fucking one of them or else you could get sued. Yeah, good luck with that.

[Welf]

Then don't make photos or above people's heads?
What if someone makes a photo of you while you attend a political demonstration your employer doesn't approve? Or you visit McDonalds too often and your mortgage goes up because your bank thinks you're too fat and die too early? Getting your photo taken and uploaded into the internet can and will lead to cost later on. So I would argue there is good reason why one should be able to control what is done with his likeness.

[General Zod]

Then don't make photos or above people's heads?
What if someone makes a photo of you while you attend a political demonstration your employer doesn't approve? Or you visit McDonalds too often and your mortgage goes up because your bank thinks you're too fat and die too early? Getting your photo taken and uploaded into the internet can and will lead to cost later on. So I would argue there is good reason why one should be able to control what is done with his likeness.

You have no reasonable expectations of privacy in a public space.

[Borgholio]

So I would argue there is good reason why one should be able to control what is done with his likeness.

If someone takes your picture and uses it for marketing or advertising purposes, then sure I agree. But this law can affect even the casual tourist, since I didn't see it specified that it only applies to professional photographers. So how do you propose that a casual photographer who is taking a picture of a building or landmark go about getting written consent from every single person within view of the camera? Not only will it be completely impossible to fully comply with the law, but it doesn't cause anybody in the background and real demonstrable harm anyways.

[Elheru Aran]

Zod is correct; if you venture into public areas (generally understood to be any area of commerce that is open to the public, streets, squares, and so forth), you are essentially acknowledging that you may be photographed or filmed at any point. Otherwise security cameras would never be used, now, would they?

When professional photography is done in a public venue, usually the only people that are expected to sign a release are those that are the actual subject of the photo. Say a fashion shoot in Times Square; the model is the only figure that's actually in full focus, everybody else is walking around, maybe you can make out their features but the model is the center of attention. Now if the model randomly interacts with a passerby and the pro takes pictures of that interaction, they would probably have to talk to the passerby and get them to sign some papers, but otherwise there is no reason to bother every single person that happens to be in the field of the camera.

Or to take another tack on it-- journalism. If media photographers had to get releases from everybody they ever took a picture from...

Basically, the only place you can expect to be safe from getting photographed in a unwanted manner are private spaces (homes) or places where casual photography is forbidden (strip clubs, bars, etc)-- usually these are closed to members of the general public who do not meet some requirement (being old enough to drink, etc). Do note that privately owned establishments and certain government offices can and do regulate photography inside their buildings-- for example, it's not uncommon for store managers to politely ask people to stop taking photos inside their stores, courts may permit only official photographers to take pictures of the proceedings, and so forth.

[Elheru Aran]

Here's another example-- when they were filming Star Trek IV in San Francisco, that bit on the street where George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig are asking bypassers for directions? One lady actually stopped to give them directions and was filmed doing so (quite unawares to her)-- when she finished and started walking off, they actually had to send a couple of guys running after her to get her to sign a contract as she was now an actor in the film (speaking part). Nobody else in the scene, apart from any extras that they had wandering around, had to go through that, because again... public space.

[Welf]

Then don't make photos or above people's heads?
What if someone makes a photo of you while you attend a political demonstration your employer doesn't approve? Or you visit McDonalds too often and your mortgage goes up because your bank thinks you're too fat and die too early? Getting your photo taken and uploaded into the internet can and will lead to cost later on. So I would argue there is good reason why one should be able to control what is done with his likeness.

You have no reasonable expectations of privacy in a public space.

but I should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity.

Here's another example-- when they were filming Star Trek IV in San Francisco, that bit on the street where George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig are asking bypassers for directions? One lady actually stopped to give them directions and was filmed doing so (quite unawares to her)-- when she finished and started walking off, they actually had to send a couple of guys running after her to get her to sign a contract as she was now an actor in the film (speaking part). Nobody else in the scene, apart from any extras that they had wandering around, had to go through that, because again... public space.

Yes, but that was in 1986, technology has changed. The woman in the scene was asked to sign a contract because she took part in a film and thus contributed to a commercial product. But now everyone who gets photographed can expect that they will get uploaded to facebook or some other internet page, and later this information will used be to track them. That is a transfer of wealth away from an individual and should be regulated accordingly.

[Borgholio]

but I should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity.

You do. A picture does not automatically reveal your identity.

[Elheru Aran]

but I should have a reasonable expectation of anonymity.

You do. A picture does not automatically reveal your identity.

Yeah, no kidding.


Stock photo from the very first page of a Google search for "dude". Do I have any idea who this guy is? Fuck no. Do I know where the picture came from? There's no watermark, so no. I suppose I could rip the EXIF if that exists for this picture, but that wouldn't tell me much because I don't know from jack about that stuff. So here we have a lovely clear photo of a random guy, that's pretty much freely available on the Internet, taken in a studio... and who knows who the hell he is, apart from people who actually know him personally, the photographer who took the picture, and some papers where he signed to allow whomever to use his image in stock photography. Otherwise... he is, in fact, anonymous.

Now how much more do you think this applies to a random photograph where you somehow manage to be in the background because you just happened to be walking by at the moment the photographer clicked the shutter?

[madd0ct0r]

It is somewhat harder to track someone who's been photographed in a studio then someone who's marked for a particualr geographical location.

[Elheru Aran]

It is somewhat harder to track someone who's been photographed in a studio then someone who's marked for a particualr geographical location.

Granted, but without specific knowledge about a person, there's not much way to identify them.

You could postulate, I suppose, a situation where the FBI is searching for a suspect for whom they have only a description but no name. Somehow they manage to hack Facebook (which I believe would be wildly illegal) in the course of their search. They could set up an algorithm to find that suspect's face in the photos of every user on Facebook. How many redundant entries would they come up with? For example, the description "brown hair, wide eyes, slight stubble, about yea tall and yea wide in the shoulders"... that could fit *me*. Unless the suspect was highly distinctive (facial scar, missing limbs, something like that), the search would still be largely garbage.

An easier way to do it would be to take a specific photograph and try to narrow it down, but it still wouldn't do much. The only thing it would confirm is that a certain person was in a certain spot at the time a photograph was taken. Think about the difficulty that the police/FBI had in finding the Tsarnev (spelling) brothers after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that was with security camera pictures. Admittedly, they did still find them within a few days... but again, that's the FBI. Your average script-kiddie isn't going to be that good.

[Borgholio]

Photographic matching would work if they had a clean frontal view of the face and facial-matching software. But a pic of the side of your face in the distance or the back of your head would render that useless.

[madd0ct0r]

It is somewhat harder to track someone who's been photographed in a studio then someone who's marked for a particualr geographical location.

Granted, but without specific knowledge about a person, there's not much way to identify them.

You could postulate, I suppose, a situation where the FBI is searching for a suspect for whom they have only a description but no name. Somehow they manage to hack Facebook (which I believe would be wildly illegal) in the course of their search. They could set up an algorithm to find that suspect's face in the photos of every user on Facebook. How many redundant entries would they come up with? For example, the description "brown hair, wide eyes, slight stubble, about yea tall and yea wide in the shoulders"... that could fit *me*. Unless the suspect was highly distinctive (facial scar, missing limbs, something like that), the search would still be largely garbage.

An easier way to do it would be to take a specific photograph and try to narrow it down, but it still wouldn't do much. The only thing it would confirm is that a certain person was in a certain spot at the time a photograph was taken. Think about the difficulty that the police/FBI had in finding the Tsarnev (spelling) brothers after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that was with security camera pictures. Admittedly, they did still find them within a few days... but again, that's the FBI. Your average script-kiddie isn't going to be that good.

why the hell would they 'hack' facebook when they can just ask?
Upload a photo to facebook and facebook's own image matching software will try and guess which of your friends it is. In one of my previous jobs I was hunting down corporate trolls who were posting fake complaints on the company's social media pages. reverse image search was often enough to demonstrate the account was false and get them banned from facebook. It also sometimes turned up 'real' accounts, which was where evidence building was a little more intense. Matches did not have to be exact, just probabilistic to narrow it to a few hundred a human can scan quickly.

[Elheru Aran]

OK, see, I didn't know you could do that with Facebook. Interesting. How do they deal with privacy issues there?

[Baffalo]

I would respond to Elheru Aran's post but unfortunately I don't have written consent from his avatar, since I live in Arkansas.

[Irbis]

Stock photo from the very first page of a Google search for "dude". Do I have any idea who this guy is? Fuck no. Do I know where the picture came from? There's no watermark, so no. I suppose I could rip the EXIF if that exists for this picture, but that wouldn't tell me much because I don't know from jack about that stuff. So here we have a lovely clear photo of a random guy, that's pretty much freely available on the Internet, taken in a studio... and who knows who the hell he is, apart from people who actually know him personally, the photographer who took the picture, and some papers where he signed to allow whomever to use his image in stock photography. Otherwise... he is, in fact, anonymous.

Now how much more do you think this applies to a random photograph where you somehow manage to be in the background because you just happened to be walking by at the moment the photographer clicked the shutter?

You're wrong. That was true 10 years ago. Now? Google and Facebook have massive resources invested into face recognition, scraping and collection program. Go upload photo to one of these - you will see a page marking all faces in photo and asking you for ID, or even identifying it itself. Add to that geolocation data from new phones with GPS and you can be invigilated 24/7 without even knowing it. It's gotten so bad in fact that huge lawsuit is incoming:

http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook ... ram-2015-4

Hell, it's gotten so bad that you now have companies offering electronic face-killers:

http://www.gizmag.com/avg-glasses-comba ... ion/36357/

Photographic matching would work if they had a clean frontal view of the face and facial-matching software. But a pic of the side of your face in the distance or the back of your head would render that useless.

2015 called. What you claim was true 10 years ago, too. Now, their technology is said to already be as good as human brain in all conditions:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1787 ... t-what-now

That "dude" EA linked? If he lives in USA, Facebook can already give you his adress, mail, phone, list of friends and who knows what else even if he never made account there. That little, innocent option his friends got ("import contact list") that is barely concealed deep data mining took care of that.

And seeing it works on Google Glass we already face the prospect of permanent invigilation that would have put 1984 to shame. When I recall evil, oppressive commie secret police in Poland before 1989 could only live wiretap 250 phones at a time (in 40 mln country)...

[Irbis]

OK, see, I didn't know you could do that with Facebook. Interesting. How do they deal with privacy issues there?

Very short answer?

They don't.

Long answer?

Facebook claims exclusive property right to sell, process, edit, delete, fuckup, rotate, flip, paint in polka-dots, (insert 10.000 more words amounting to coverup of every single possible legal case giving them rights to do every single possible thing to what you upload). They want to sell your photo as a background of anal bleaching and whitening agent? They can. (it's actually real story). The photo wasn't your to upload and now angry owner sues you? Oops, yes, you, not them, because you also agreed to be only person liable for anything by checking mark in 50 pages long EULA using exclusively legal, not common sense, terms.

Wonderful, job-creating, economy-growing, isn't it? So deal with it, because their lobby matters more in congress than some pesky mouth breathers upset Zuckerberg will be able to buy two Ferraris daily selling automined content instead of just one, ungrateful swines. Rights? What's that? What rights?

And the best part is, since even that laughable scam that SAFE HARBOR was didn't managed to take away all rights of EU citizens, US corporations now push even larger mafia-like fuckery, TTIP, that will permanently transfer away all rights from everyone to big corporations. Now, all the corporation will need to say you cost it (even potential, or imaginary) profits and they will be able to sue everyone, even governments. Lovely, yes?

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/com ... 79688.html

[slebetman]

OK, see, I didn't know you could do that with Facebook. Interesting. How do they deal with privacy issues there?

They're handling it by getting sued: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015 ... ggestions/

A Chicago man has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Facebook, alleging that the social networking giant is in violation of an Illinois state law that requires users to expressly consent to instances where their biometric information being used.
Plaintiff Carlo Licata argues that he and countless other Illinois residents have had their rights violated under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by Facebook's "Tag Suggestions" feature. That feature is powered by facial recognition technology, and operates without the consent of those being tagged.

Licata wants the Cook County court to declare that Facebook is in violation of BIPA, ordering it to halt its practice, and to award statutory damages to the class, which has yet to be certified.

[Welf]

It is somewhat harder to track someone who's been photographed in a studio then someone who's marked for a particualr geographical location.

Granted, but without specific knowledge about a person, there's not much way to identify them.

You could postulate, I suppose, a situation where the FBI is searching for a suspect for whom they have only a description but no name. Somehow they manage to hack Facebook (which I believe would be wildly illegal) in the course of their search. They could set up an algorithm to find that suspect's face in the photos of every user on Facebook. How many redundant entries would they come up with? For example, the description "brown hair, wide eyes, slight stubble, about yea tall and yea wide in the shoulders"... that could fit *me*. Unless the suspect was highly distinctive (facial scar, missing limbs, something like that), the search would still be largely garbage.

An easier way to do it would be to take a specific photograph and try to narrow it down, but it still wouldn't do much. The only thing it would confirm is that a certain person was in a certain spot at the time a photograph was taken. Think about the difficulty that the police/FBI had in finding the Tsarnev (spelling) brothers after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that was with security camera pictures. Admittedly, they did still find them within a few days... but again, that's the FBI. Your average script-kiddie isn't going to be that good.

They don't need to hack Facebook; they have built their own database.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says its facial recognition project that stores millions of mug shots and other photos is out of the pilot stage and is at "full operational capability."
Further Reading
Facial recognition nabs 14-year fugitive in Nepal, FBI says

Wanted man was "very comfortable" and "never thought he would be discovered."

The Next Generation Identification system, combined with criminal fingerprints, "will provide the nation's law enforcement community with an investigative tool that provides an image-searching capability of photographs associated with criminal identities," the FBI said in a statement Monday.

The full deployment of the program comes three months after James Comey, the bureau's director, announced that the agency was "piloting the use of mug shots, along with our fingerprint database, to see if we can find bad guys by matching pictures with mug shots."

Under the facial recognition program, law enforcement agencies will be able to cross-check images with those in other criminal databases.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, under the Freedom of Information Act, obtained records from the bureau showing that the database will have as many as 52 million images by next year and include pictures of innocent people. The database is expected to flourish in numbers. There were more than 12 million arrests in 2012, according to the latest FBI figures available. That's one arrest every two seconds.

Full article

That is a step up from normal surveilance where police departements combine social media profils for more information.

How NYPD Surveillance Could Affect Eric Garner Protesters
Nationwide protests continued to erupt this week in response to a New York grand jury’s decision Wednesday not to indict the police officer responsible for the choking death of Eric Garner. The New York Police Department has already arrested hundreds of protesters as they blocked major intersections and marched throughout the city. As the demonstrations grow, peaceful protesters should expect to get caught in the NYPD’s expanding surveillance web.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has stepped up its social media monitoring in recent years, even adding a Facial Recognition Unit dedicated to combing Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to identify suspects. The department also announced in November it plans to beef up its social media monitoring to weed out lone wolf terrorists, as part of its 9/11-era programs used to track extremist movements online.

But the NYPD has a history of using surveillance tools to track individuals involved in legal protests. The Occupy Wall Street protests of 2012 faced intense surveillance, both by cameras and as the NYPD monitored organizers’ social media accounts. Twitter was forced to give up the account of an Occupy protester who was charged with disorderly conduct. The department also reluctantly disbanded its unit dedicated to mapping Muslim community members’ activities using surveillance cameras and combing online forums.

Full article.

Yeah, no kidding.


Stock photo from the very first page of a Google search for "dude". Do I have any idea who this guy is? Fuck no. Do I know where the picture came from? There's no watermark, so no. I suppose I could rip the EXIF if that exists for this picture, but that wouldn't tell me much because I don't know from jack about that stuff. So here we have a lovely clear photo of a random guy, that's pretty much freely available on the Internet, taken in a studio... and who knows who the hell he is, apart from people who actually know him personally, the photographer who took the picture, and some papers where he signed to allow whomever to use his image in stock photography. Otherwise... he is, in fact, anonymous.

Now how much more do you think this applies to a random photograph where you somehow manage to be in the background because you just happened to be walking by at the moment the photographer clicked the shutter?

Correction: Your search results. They are customized for you and I get different ones.
I was last year on vacation in Dubai and made a photo with me and behind me a painting of the local king. I immediately got his public page linked. Solely with the picture as basis. I'm sure I could find that guy if I had more rights than as simple user.

Also, did you hear of "Deep Face", Facebook's new software?

Facebook’s facial recognition software is now as accurate as the human brain, but what now?

Facebook’s facial recognition research project, DeepFace (yes really), is now very nearly as accurate as the human brain. DeepFace can look at two photos, and irrespective of lighting or angle, can say with 97.25% accuracy whether the photos contain the same face. Humans can perform the same task with 97.53% accuracy. DeepFace is currently just a research project, but in the future it will likely be used to help with facial recognition on the Facebook website. It would also be irresponsible if we didn’t mention the true power of facial recognition, which Facebook is surely investigating: Tracking your face across the entirety of the web, and in real life, as you move from shop to shop, producing some very lucrative behavioral tracking data indeed.

Full article

The software isn't perfect but the algorithms and computing power will only improve.