You have no expectation of privacy in any public place, period. Photographers have always had the right to take your picture without your permission, as long as it is not used for commercial purposes. It sounds like your complaint amounts to this: everyone will be a photographer once this becomes popular.
No. In the US if you take a picture of me in a public setting, you own that photo and all rights that go with it. Unless you do something so distasteful and unwarranted that I can claim material harm, I have no recourse against what you choose to do with that picture. See, for example, the paparazzi.
My expectation is that if someone takes a photo of me, I maintain some level of control over that photo. That is NOT the current situation.
Yes, that's why I mentioned the publication of the photo for some commercial purposes, eg advertising. Nobody is disputing your right to take pictures in public.
Only in the US. In most developed nations, this isn't the case: even in public you have a certain amount of privacy allowed, so for instance, people aren't allowed to take your photo without permission. Of course, there's practical limits here, but usually it comes down to whether the person is the subject of the photo or not. If a person sees themselves in a public photo, but they're in a crowd off in the distance, then that's ok. If someone is following them around and taking fairly close photos of them, that's not.
If I'm in a public space w/o an expectation of privacy you have every right to photograph me. Same goes for my daughter, bathing-suit or street-clothes.
I value the right of others to make photos in public spaces and I recognize that it applies to me as a subject.
I don't read that as "no one can take my photo", though. Certainly that language should protect me from people invading my private space to take photos of me, but if I'm out and about in public, I should have no expectation that no photos will be taken of me, and I would feel very wrong asking someone to delete a photo of me in a public place. I would consider that to be infringing on their rights.
I get that photos of people can be a lot more harmful than a casual photographer might assume, but I would never accede to a request from a random stranger to delete a photograph that they just happened to be in. If someone requested that I not take a photo of them, I personally would comply out of a sense of politeness, but I don't believe anyone has a legal or moral obligation to comply when in public.
(But yes, I know, this is just my opinion and preference, just like yours is yours.)
Your assumptions are not borne out in practice. Others that purposefully take my picture in order to share that on social media does not include total strangers making pictures on the streets.
But if a stranger on the street wants to make a close up picture of me then it could get interesting, so far nobody has been that impolite.
I don't think the author was implying that taking one's picture without permission in a public space is illegal, merely that it's rude or weird. Which it often is.
Contrary to popular belief, everyone is allowed to take picture of you, as long as you are in public space. They only need your authorization to use the picture.
Assuming your work takes you anywhere outside, or in a vehicle, or in any public area, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
You can't reasonably expect someone photographing a public place to announce to everyone they're about to take a photograph, or get a waiver from everyone, or blur the faces of everyone who they can't get to sign.
> you are not allowed to take a photo of people without permission, even in public
I'm curious how this is expected to work in practice. Is there a clear definition of "a photo of people"? Taking a close-up portrait of a random stranger in public would be one extreme (and I guess most people would agree it should require permission). Presumably a photo of my kids and their friends having fun at the park is still clearly "a photo of people", and therefore also requires permission.
But if I take a photo of a street scene in Berlin, do I have to get permission from every passer-by who happens to appear? How about a landscape photo where I only realise later, on reviewing the picture, that there were a couple of hikers on a distant hill? To my mind, that's not "a photo of people", yet there are people in the photo.
Somewhere between the extremes, it seems to me there's an awfully wide grey area.
"Still, all photographers have the right to photograph in public."
I've always agreed with that. What I have been saying is that there are ways they can exercise that right that will be perceived as rude, and that that perception is definitely not made unreasonable by any absence of law on the matter, and is often in fact reasonable.
No. At least in the US you have no rights to photos taken of you in a public place except for certain specific situations. For examples, photos used for commercial purposes (e.g. ads, marketing materials) in which you are clearly recognizable (not part of a crowd shot) require model releases. However if I take a photo of you on the street and publish it in a personal blog, article, etc. you basically have no recourse. If you hold your breath and turn purple, I might take it down to make you go away but I have no obligation to do so.
> When you go outdoors, people are free to look at you, but that does not mean (as a rule) they can shoot pictures of you without your permission.
That's not generally true in the United States. If you are on public property, you can take a photo of anything or anyone you can see. You do not need their permission.
There may be local laws that restrict this, but they are not the common case.
That's not entirely true. Photographers have long had very broad rights about shooting in public [0]. If you're in a high-traffic area, it's fairly likely you could end up in someone's photo. You might be lost in the sea of people, but you'll probably also be lost in the sea of mass data collection.
My point is not that "if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear". There is perhaps a corollary, "just who do you think you are that anyone would be interested in your life?" But even that is beside the point. The point is that you've never actually had this extremely broad version of a right to privacy that you think you had.
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