After artist Kyle McDonald rigged Apple Store computers to take photos of customers, the Secret Service confiscated his computers with a search warrant for computer fraud.
McDonald had been compiling photos for a project called “People Staring at Computers.” He had installed a program on about 100 computers at two New York Apple stores that automatically takes a photo once every minute and sends it back to his server.
After Mashable published the story on Thursday, more than 100 people commented on the project, many of them on its legal implications. People argued every position from “you arenât allowed to set up public surveillance and use peopleâs imagery without permission” to “In a private place you can also take pictures as long as you have the property owners permission or there are no restrictions by the property owner on taking pictures.”
We decided to ask someone with a law degree.
“My guess is that virtually everyone who appears in this guy’s slide show also appears in the stores’ security video, sometimes perhaps from the same angle(s), and few people would be surprised or offended that they have been monitored in this way,” wrote Craig LaMay, who teaches a course in media law and ethics at Northwestern University, in an email.
LaMay says he has a hard time seeing where any legal wrong regarding privacy could be established as people in an Apple Store have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Whether it was art or surveillance, he says, is irrelevant.
“ASIDE from the artist’s unauthorized use of someone else’s property, how is this different from being photographed in public anywhere else — out in the mall, at the beach, at the ballgame?” he wrote.
Using Apple Store computers to accomplish the photography is a separate issue, and given that the Secret Service’s search warrant was for computer fraud, the use of them is likely the issue in question.
On Thursday, McDonald tweeted that the search warrant said he was in violation of 18 USC section 1030.
Eric Goldman, the director of the High Tech Law Institute and associate professor at Santa Clara Law, says that the law “restricts accessing someone else’s computer and obtaining information from that computer” and that “capturing images from Apple’s computers could trigger that standard.” Some other provisions of the same law could also apply, he says.
According to Goldman, installing “surreptitious monitoring devices” on someone else’s computers would in most cases be considered illegal. Whether McDonald’s project falls into this category is yet to be determined (if charges are pressed).
McDonald tweeted last week that he has contacted online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation about his situation. He said they have advised him to stay quiet for now. A spokesperson from the EFF declined to comment.
More About: apple, Apple Store, Kyle McDonald, people staring at computers
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