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You have no right to not be photographed in public

I was part of a debate yesterday on Facebook that began with my friend Raam Dev making an update. It was public, so I’m quoting it here:

My walk today took me through a school where I came across a bunch of little kids playing a supervised, but quite spirited game of girls vs boys tug-of-war. They were so excited, screaming and beaming smiles as they pulled. I wasn’t able to resist a huge smile and, as I often do with things that make me smile, I stopped for a moment to take a quick photo with my phone. Then, as I walked away, I was stopped and told that photos are not allowed. “Why?”, I asked. “Privacy concerns.” Sad world. That made me want to give up photography right there and stick to writing. I suddenly felt more grateful for free speech laws.

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Backing up my life on the cloud

For well over a decade I’ve been using online storage solutions for files that have been important to me. But as the years have gone by, what I’ve wanted to store has quite dramatically increased in size. 2Gb of free … Read more …

Do you want to drop off the grid?

With all the talk about NSA surveillance of everyone’s online activities, and how you can’t trust any corporation on the internet because they’re all complicit in monitoring your activities. there’s a lot of people getting more and more pissed off with … Read more …

Privacy in the modern world

Privacy is such an interesting thing. The way I see it is if you want privacy you’ll need to drop out of society. Your name, location and activities should not be registered anywhere; you should be completely ‘off the grid’. … Read more …