So everybody is worked up about the Senate going after Mark Zuckerberg this week. And the question floating around our little corner of the world is a fair one. If Washington starts rewriting the rules for the glasses, does that trickle down to us? To the people walking around with a camera in plain sight?
Short answer. No. Longer answer, also no, but with a lot more yelling about the Constitution in between (which is my favorite kind of yelling).
Here is the line, and it matters. What the Senate is looking at is somebody using Meta glasses to film another person in a private setting, in a private place. A private situation, not a public one. That is the concern. It is not about clandestinely filming somebody out on the street, and it is not about what we do. Do not mix those two up, because Washington is not mixing them up here.
And public is protected in this country. Freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, we fall under all of it. The First Amendment did not carve out an exception for unless somebody feels weird about it. In America, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy once you step out in public. That is still the law. That is not changing because a letter used the word bystander a few too many times. If you are out in public with a video camera or a still camera, in plain sight, that will always be protected. A Senate concern about filming private situations in private places will have no effect on that.
Now, is bystander consent a phrase worth watching? Sure. Watch it. The letter to Zuckerberg hammers on it, the idea that people caught in a frame should control how their image gets processed. And if that idea ever migrated from glasses to cameras, that would be a different conversation. But right now it is a letter about glasses, not a law about photography. Politicians love taking a thing to the nth degree. These are the same politicians who still have not fixed daylight saving time, so forgive me if I am not packing up my camera just yet.
And no, this is not how it works everywhere. Look at Germany sometime, where the rules about who owns the rights to a photo of a person on the street are a whole different animal. We are not Germany. This is America, and here the street photographer is on solid ground.
So get out there. Shoot your photos. Shoot your video. Worry not. You are protected by the First Amendment of these United States of America.
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