understanding

For my question of the day today, I asked:

Do you think it’s fair for someone to take a picture of you in public and post it on the internet?

This of course was prompted by the recent street view controversy, but most students weren’t aware of that. They talked about how they generally don’t want unflattering pictures of themselves on their friends’ MySpace pages, but there were also dissenting voices basically saying, “Get over it.” When I brought up the issue of documenting police brutality, they almost all said that was a totally different thing. I usually let their voices and opinions guide the conversation, so I’m not sure how well they understood the problem of balance between an open society with press freedoms and the implications for personal privacy.

But when I explained what’s going on now with street view, they were remarkably pragmatic about the whole thing. More than one student (in various classes) came up with a practical solution: Just auto-detect faces and blur them out. They seemed to not be too worried about it in general.